The Girls Next Door
by ireallydontwantanametoday
Summary: Naomi is working for the Fitches this summer and tries to win Katie over. Somewhere along the way she falls for Emily. Naomily.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **The Girls Next Door

**Summary: **Naomi works at the Fitch's Marina and spends the summer trying to win over Katie.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything related to skins.

**Rating: **M

Katie smiled down at me, her brown hair glinting golden in the sunlight. She shouted over the noise of the boat motor and the wind, "Naomi, when we're old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend." She didn't even care that the others could hear her.

"I'm there!" I exclaimed, because I was nothing if not coy. All the girls ate out of my hand, I tell you. "When will we be old enough?"

Her brown eyes, darker than the tree trunks behind her, seemed to glow in her tanned face. She answered me, smiling. Her lips moved.

"I didn't hear you, what did you say?" I know how to draw out a romantic moment. She spoke to me again. I still couldn't hear her, though the boat motor and the wind hadn't gotten any louder. Maybe she was just mouthing words, pretending to say something sweet I couldn't catch. Girls were like that. She'd just been teasing me all along-

"You ass!" I sat straight up in my sweat soaked bed, wiping away the strands of my hair stuck to my wet face. Then I realized what I said out loud."Sorry Mom," I told her photo on my bedside table. But maybe she hadn't heard me over my alarm clock blaring ADELE," Someone Like You."

Or maybe she'd understand. I'd just had another close encounter with Katie! Even if it was only in my dreams.

Usually I didn't remember my dreams. Whenever my adopted brother, Cook, was home from Uni, he was two years ahead in school, he told dad and me at breakfast what he'd dreamt the night before. Megan Fox kicking his butt on the sidewalk after he tried to take her picture (pure fantasy). Amanda Bynes dressed as the highway patrol, pulling him over to give him a traffic ticket.

I was jealous. I wanted to dream about Megan Fox kicking my butt. I had googled "dreaming" and found out some people don't remember their dreams if their bodies are used to getting up at the same hour every morning and have plenty of time to complete the dream cycle.

So why'd I remember my dream this morning? it was the first day of summer vacation, that's why. To start work at the Marina, I'd set my clock thirty minutes earlier than the school year. Lo and behold, here was my dream. About Katie: check. Blowing me off as usual: no! That might happen in my dreams, but it wasn't going to happen in real life. Not again. Katie would be mine, starting today.

I gave mom on my bedside table an okay sign - the wake boarding signal for ready to go - before rolling out of bed.

My dad and brother suspected nothing, ho ho. They didn't even notice what I was wearing. Our conversation at breakfast was the same one we had every summer morning since we were five years old.

Dad to Cook: "You take care of your sister today."

Cook, between bites of egg: "Roger that."

Dad to me: "And you watch out around those girls next door."

Me: (Eye Roll.)

Cook: "I had this brill dream about Anne Hathaway."

Post-oatmeal, Cook and I trotted across our yard and the Fitch's yard to the complex of showrooms, warehouses and docks at the Fitch's Marina. The morning air was already thick with the heat and humidity and the smell of cut grass that would last the entire summer. I didn't mind. I liked the heat. And I quivered my flip-flops at the prospect of another whole summer with Katie. I'd been going through withdrawal.

In past years, any one of the three Fitch kids, including Katie, might have shown up at my house to kick the football around or play video games with my brother. They might let me play to if they felt sorry for me, or if their mom had guilted them into it. And Cook might go to their house at any time. But I couldn't go to their house. If I'd walked in, they'd have stopped what they were doing, looked up, and wondered what I was doing there. They were Cook's friends, not mine.

Well Emily was my friend. She was probably more my friend than Cook's. Even though we were the same age, I didn't have any classes with her at college, so you'd think that she'd walk a hundred yards over to my house for a visit every once in a while. But she didn't: And if I'd gone to visit her, it would have been obvious that I was looking for Katie out of the corner of my eye the whole time.

For the past nine months, with Cook off at Uni, my last tie to Katie had been severed. She was one year ahead of me, so I didn't have any classes with her, either. I wasn't even in the same wing of the college. I saw her once at a football game, and once in front of the movie theater when I'd ridden around with Panda for a few minutes after a tennis match.

But I never approached her. She was always flirting with Mini McGuinness or Grace Blood or whatever glamorous person she was with at the moment. I was too young for her, and she never even thought of hooking up with me. On the very rare occasion when she took the garbage to the side of the road at the same time I walked to the mailbox, she gave me the usual beaming smile and big hug and acted like I was her best friend ever… for thirty heavenly seconds.

It had been a long winter. Finally we were back to the summer. The Fitches always needed extra help at the marina during the busy season from the end of May to the beginning of September. Just like last year, I had a job there – and an excuse to make Katie my captive audience.

I sped up my trek across the pine needles between the trees and found myself in a footrace against Cook. It was totally unfair because I was carrying my backpack and he was wearing sneakers, but I beat him to the warehouse by half a length anyway.

The Fitches had gotten to the warehouse before us and claimed the good jobs, so I wouldn't have a chance to work side by side with Katie. Effy was helping take boats out of storage. She wanted Cook to work with her so they could catch up with their lives at two different Uni's. Katie and Emily were already gone, delivering the boats to customers up and down the lake for the weekend. Katie wasn't round to see my outfit. I was so desperate to get going on this "new me" thing, I would have settled or a double take from Emily or Effy.

All I got was Mrs. Fitch. Come to think of it, she was a good person to run the outfit by. She wore stylish clothes, as far as I could tell. Her brown pinstriped hair was cut to flip up in the back. She looked exactly like you'd want your mom to look so as not to embarrass you in public.

I found her in the office and hopped onto a stool behind her. Looking over her shoulder as she typed on the computer, I asked, "Notice anything different?"

She tucked her pinstriped hair behind her ear and squinted at the screen. "I'm using the wrong font?"

"Notice anything different about my boobs?"

That got her attention. She whirled around in her chair and peered at my chest. "You changed your boobs?"

"I'm showing my boobs," I said proudly, moving my palm in front of them like presenting them on a TV commercial. All this can be yours! Or, rather, your daughter's. My usual summer uniform was the outgrown clothes Cook had given me over the years: jeans, which I cut off into shorts and wore with a wide belt to hold up the waist, and T-shirts from her football team. Under that, for wake boarding in the afternoon, I used to wear a one- piece sports bathing suit with full coverage that reached all the way to my neck.

Early in the boob-emerging years, I had no boobs, and I was touchy about it. Remember in middle school algebra class, you'd type 55378008 on your calculator, turn it upside down, and hand it to the flat-chested girl across the aisle? I was that girl, you wanker. I would have died twice if any of the boys had mentioned my booblets.

Last year, I thought my boobs had progressed quite nicely. And I progressed from the one-piece into a tankini. But I wasn't quite ready for any more exposure. I didn't want the girls to treat me like an attractive cutlet of the girls they could have.

Now I did. So today I'd worn a cute little bikini. Over that, I still wore Cook's cutoff jeans. Amazingly, they looked sexy, riding low on my hips, when I traded the football t-shirt for a pink tank that ended above my belly button and hugged my figure. I even had a little cleavage. I was so proud. Katie was going to love it.

Jenna Fitch stared at my chest, perplexed. Finally she said, "Oh I get it. You're trying to look hot."

"Thank you!" mission accomplished.

"Here's a hint. Close your legs."

I snapped my thighs together on the stool. People always scolded me for sitting like a boy. Then I slid off the stool and stomped to the door in a huff. 'Where do you want me?"

She'd turned back to the computer. "You've got gas."

Oh, fucking great. I headed out the office door, towards the front dock to man the gas pumps. This meant at some point during the day, one of the girls would look around the marina office and ask, "Who has gas?" and another girl would answer, "Naomi has gas." If I were really lucky, Katie would be in on the joke.

The office door squeaked behind me, "Naomi," Mrs. Campbell called. "Did you want to talk?" Noooooooo. Nothing like that. I'd only gone into her office and tried to start a conversation. Jenna had three daughters. But she still didn't know how to talk to me. My mother had died in a boating accident when I was four. I didn't know how to talk to a woman. Any conversation between Jenna and me was doomed from the start.

"No why?" I asked without turning around. I'd been galloping down the wooden steps, but now I stepped very carefully, looking down, as if I needed to examine every footfall so I wouldn't trip.

"Watch out around the girls," she warned me. I raised my hand and wiggled my fingers, toodle-dee- doo, dismissing her. Those girls were harmless. Those girls had better watch out for me.

Really, aside from the specter of the girls discussing my intestinal problems, I enjoyed having gas. I got to sit on the dock with my feet in the water and watch the kingfishers and the herons glide low over the surface. Later I'd swim on the side of the dock upriver from the gasoline. Not now, before Katie saw me for the first time that summer. I would be in and out of the lake and windy boats all day, and my hair would look like hell. That was understood. But I wanted have clean, dry, styled hair at least the first time she saw me, and I would hope she kept the memory alive. I might go swimming after she saw me, while I waited for people to drive up to the gas pumps in their boats.

I was just folding a twenty into my back pocket when Katie and Emily came zipping across the water in the boat emblazoned with Fitch's Marina down the side, blasting Nickelback from the speakers. They turned hard at the edge of the idle zone. Three-foot swells shook the floating dock violently and would have shaken me off into the water if I hadn't held onto the rail. Then the bow of the boat eased against the padding on the dock. Emily must be the one driving. Katie would have driven all the way to the warehouse, closer to where they'd pick up the next boat for delivery.

In fact, as Katie threw me the rope to tie the stern and Emily cut the engine, I could hear them arguing about this. Katie and Emily argued pretty much 24/7. I was used to it. But I would have rather not have heard Katie complaining that they were going to have to walk a whole fifty extra yards and up the stairs just so Emily could say hi to me.

Katie jumped off the boat. Her weight rocked the floating dock again as she tied up the bow. Then she straightened and smiled her beautiful smile at me, and I forgave her everything.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

"Hey, Buddy," Katie said to me. I got a close up view of her strange, deep brown eyes and tan skin as she threw her arms around me and kept walking right over me. I had to throw my arms around her, too, to keep from thudding flat on my back on the dock.

"Oh pardon me!" she said, pulling me out from under her and setting me on my feet again. "I didn't even see you there."

"That's quite alright," I managed in the same fake-formal tone. Her warm hands still held my waist. This was the first time a girl had ever touched my bare tummy. My happy skin sent shocked messages to my brain that went something like, 'She's touching me! Are you getting this? She's touching me! Eeeeeee!' My brain got it, all right, and put the rest of my body on high alert. My heart thumped painfully, just like in my dream. But as I looked into her eyes, I saw she was already gone, glancing up the stairs to the marina. If I didn't know better, I'd say she was flirting with me. I knew better. She treated all girls this way.

She slid out of my grasp. She may have had to shake one hand violently to extricate it from my vise-like grip. "See you later, junior." She threw over her shoulder at me as she climbed the steps to the marina.

When we were kids she started calling Cook McGillicuddy because she thought the name was hilarious, even though our last name was Campbell. It caught on with the other girls, and Effy told everyone at school. I'm not sure anyone in town knew my brother as Cook, until he threatened to punch anyone who called him that. Thankfully everyone in town knew me as Naomi. The names Katie had made up for me were too long to be practical nicknames: McGillicuddy Junior, McGillicuddy the younger, McGillicuddy part Deux, McGillicuddy returns, McGillicuddy strikes back, McGillicuddy's buddy.

You see what I'm up against? Obviously she still saw me as Cook's little sister. I sighed, watching her climb the steps, muscles moving underneath the smooth skin of her legs. She was immune to the delicious temptation of my pink tank top. But I had another trick up my sleeve, or lack thereof. Later that afternoon, when we went wakeboarding I would initiate Stage Two: Bikini.

The dock dipped again as Emily jumped from the boat. I turned to greet her. We did our secret handshake, which we'd been adding to for years: the basic shake (first grade), upside down (second grade), with a twist (fourth grade), high five (fifth grade), Low five (seventh grade), pinky swear (eighth grade), elbows touching (ninth grade). We'd been known to do the secret handshake while passing in the halls at school, and on the sidelines during the football games that Emily cheers at.

Everybody on the girl's tennis team fetched water and bandages for the football team during their games. It wasn't fair the football team didn't bring us drinks and bandages at the tennis tournaments. I never complained, though, because I got to stand on the football field where the action was, which is all I really wanted. The secret handshake had proven surprisingly hard while carrying water. We'd made it work.

But Emily had gotten together with Mandy a month before. Ever since I'd heard a rumor that she didn't want her girlfriend doing the secret handshake with "that ho next-door," I'd tried to cool it in public. I mean if I'd had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have wanted her doing a secret handshake with anybody but me, especially if she looked like Emily.

Because Emily looked almost exactly like Katie. Up close and in daylight, you'd never mistake them for each other, especially now that they're older. Their facial features were different. At distance or in the dark, all bets were off.

Emily's hair was shorter than Katie's, but you couldn't tell this when they were both windblown in the extreme, like now. If you happened to be watching them from your bedroom window as they got into a fight and beat the crap out of each other at the edge of their yard where their mom couldn't see them from their house - not that I would ever do such a thing – you could tell them apart only because Emily had more muscles. Also, they walked differently: Katie cruised gracefully, while Emily bounced like the ball that got away from you and led you into the street after it.

But what I always looked for to tell them apart instantly, when I could see it, was Emily's skull - and – crossbones pendant on a leather cord. I bought the pendant from a bubblegum machine when we were twelve. In one of my many failed attempts over the years to become more girl - like, I'd been trying for a Mary-Kate and Ashley pendant for myself. The last thing I wanted was a skull and cross bones. I'd given it to Emily because it was made for her.

Suddenly I realized I was standing on the hot wood of the dock, still touching elbows with Emily, staring at the pendant that rested on her breasts. And when I looked up into her dark brown eyes, I saw that she was staring at my neck. No. Down lower.

"What'cha staring at?" I asked.

She cleared her throat. "Tank top or what?" This was her seal of approval, as in, 'last day of school or what?' or, 'Arsenal Cheerleaders or what?' Fuck yes! She wasn't Katie, but she was built of the same material. This was a good sign.

I pumped her for more info, to make sure. "What about my tank top?"

"You're wearing it." She looked out across the lake, showing me her profile. Her cheek had turned bright red under her tan. I had embarrassed the wrong girl. Damn, it was back to the football t-shirt for me.

No it wasn't, either. I couldn't abandon my plan. I had fish to catch.

"Look," I told Emily, as if she hadn't already looked. "Katie's leaving at the end of summer. Yeah, yeah she'll be back next summer, but I'm afraid I won't be able to compete once she's had a taste of Uni life and sorority girls. It's now or never, and desperate times call for desperate tank tops."

Emily opened her mouth to say something. I shut her up by raising my hand. Imitating her husky voice, I said, "I don't know why you want to hook up with that tosser." We'd had this conversation whenever we saw each other lately. I said in my normal voice, "I just do, okay? Let me do it and don't get in my way. Stay out of my net little dolphin." I bumped her hip with my hip.

She folded her arms, stared me down, and pressed her lips together. She tried to look grim. I could tell she was struggling not to laugh. "Don't call me that."

"Why not?"

"Dolphins don't live in the lake," she said matter-of-factly, as if this was the real reason. The real reason was that the woman within her did not want to be called "little" anything. She was like that.

I shrugged. "Fine little brim, little bass." She walked toward the stairs.

"Little striper."

She turned. "What if Katie actually asked you out?"

I didn't want to be teased about this. It could happen! "You act like it's the most remote poss-"

"She has to ride around with the sunroof open just so she can fit her big head in the truck. Where would you sit?"

"In her lap?" A look of disgust flashed across Emily's face before she jogged up the stairs, her weight making the weathered planks creak with every step.

I wasn't really worried she would ruin things for me and Katie, though Emily and I have always gotten along great. When the other girls, plus Cook, picked on us, we stood up for each other as best as we could. The idea of me hooking up with Katie bothered her simply because she hated Katie with the white heat of a thousand suns, and the feeling was mutual.

A few minutes later, just as I was helping the clueless captain of a ski boat shove off, I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me. Katie alert! Sensory overload! But no, I saw from the pendant that it was Emily.

On cue, Katie puttered past us in a powerful boat, blasting Crossfade instead of Nickelback for a little variety, looking so powerful herself in cool sunglasses, her tanned chest polished by the sun. She waited until she reached the very edge of the idle zone (Mr. Fitch was probably watching from somewhere inside the marina to make sure the girls idled in the idle zone) and floored it across the lake to make another delivery.

I'd forgotten all about Emily behind me until she tickled my ribs. In fact, I was so startled, would have fallen into the lake if she hadn't caught me. This was the second time ever a girl had touched my bare tummy, and something of an anticlimax.

Don't get me wrong – the attention and her fingers on my skin were very pleasant. But she was just being friendly, sisterly. She was totally devoted to Mandy, and she knew I was totally devoted to Katie. It was like craving a doughnut and getting French fries. You were left with an odd taste in your mouth, and you still wanted that doughnut afterward.

For the rest of the morning, I pumped gas. I worked on my baby tan through the SPF 45. At lunchtime I went up to the marina and ate the chicken salad sandwich Jenna made me and watched What Not To Wear, which I'd been studying recently almost as hard as I studied for my algebra final this week. I ate very slowly, one nibble of bread and scrap of celery at a time, in case the beginning of Katie's lunch coincided with the end of mine.

After Jenna looked in on me the fourteenth time, I got the hint and galloped back down to the gas pumps. Of course that's when Katie and Emily roared back into the marina in the boat.

I gave up, now that Katie had seen me dry, it was safe to go swimming. Safe being a relative term. I knew from experience that before you went swimming off a dock for the first time each summer, you needed to check the sides and the ladder carefully for bryozoa, colonies of slimy green critters that grew on hard surfaces under water (think coral, but gelatinous- shudder).

They wouldn't hurt you, they're part of a healthy freshwater ecosystem, their presence meant the waters were pristine and unpolluted, blah blah blah – but none of this was any consolation if you accidentally touched them. Poking around with a water ski and finding nothing, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching for Katie from the water.

And getting out occasionally when she sped by in the boat, in order to woo her like Halle Berry coming out of the ocean in a James Bond movie (which I had seen with my brother about a hundred times. Bikini scene, seven hundred times). Only I seemed to have misplaced my dagger.

Sometimes Katie was behind the wheel. Sometimes Emily was. I could tell which was which even when I was too far away to see the skull and crossbones. Emily was the one waving to me, and Katie was the one looking hot behind her sunglasses. Maybe Katie was watching me and I couldn't tell from her mysterious exterior. She only appeared unmoved by my newfound buxom beauty.

Yeah, probably not. There were several problems with this theory, not the least of which was that when they passed by, I never timed my exit from the water quite right for Stage Two: Bikini. Then, in case they did turn around, I'd had to appear as if I meant to get out all along- for some reason other than driving Katie to distraction with lust. Oh- hair toss- I was getting out to look at teen fashion mags, like a normal almost- seventeen - year - old girl. I examined the pictures and checked this info against what I'd gathered from what not to wear, plus some common sense (I hoped). High fashion was all well and good, but if it prompted the object of your affection to comment that you looked pregnant or you had elf feet, really it wasn't serving its purpose.

Around four o'clock I climbed the stairs and walked around to the warehouses. I knew Cook wouldn't save me the hike by driving around to the gas pumps to pick me up. Emily might, if it was up to her, but it wasn't up to her.

Just as well. Emily, Katie, Effy and Cook, all wearing bikinis, well except for Cook, stood in a line, pitching wakeboards and water skis and life vests and tow ropes from the warehouse into the boat. Emily, Effy and Cook half turned towards Katie as she related some amusing anecdote that was probably only thirty percent true. In fact, Emily, Cook and Effy didn't notice, but Katie had stopped working. They handed wakeboards around Katie in the line. Her only job was to entertain.

I wanted her to entertain me, too. I could listen to Katie's stories forever. The way she told it, a trip to the grocery store sounded like American Pie. But I had a job to do. I had a grand entrance to make. While walking towards them, I dropped my backpack, then pulled my tank top off over my head to reveal my bikini.

And just balled up my tank top in one hand as if it were nothing, and threw it into the boat. "Heey!" I said in a high voice as I hugged Effy, whom I hadn't seen since she'd come home from Uni for the summer a few days ago. She hugged me back and kept glancing at my boobs and trying not to. My brother had that look on his face like he was going to ask dad to take me to the shrink again.

I bent over with my butt towards them, dropped my shorts, and threw those in the boat, too. When I straightened and turned towards the girls, I was in for a shock. I had thought that I wanted Katie to stare at me. I did want her to stare. But now that Katie, Emily and Effy were all staring at me, speechless, I wondered whether there was chicken salad on my bikini, or - somewhat worse - an exposed nipple.

I didn't feel a breeze down there, though. And even I, with my limited understanding of grand entrances and seducing girls, understood that if I glanced in the direction they were staring and there were no nipple, the effect of the grand entrance would be lost. So I snapped my fingers and asked, "Zone much?" Translation: I'm hot? Really? Hmph.

Emily blinked and turned to Katie. "Bikini or what?"

Katie still stared at my boobs. Slowly she brought her strange brown eyes up to meet my eyes. "This does a lot for you," she said, gesturing to the bikini with the hand flourish of Clinton from what not to wear. Surely this was my imagination. She didn't really know that I'd been studying how to be a girl for the past year!

"Katie," I said without missing a beat, "I do a lot for the bikini." Effy snorted and shoved Katie, Emily shoved her in the other direction. Katie smiled and seemed perplexed, like she was trying to think of a comeback but couldn't for once.

Off to the side, Cook still looked very uncomfortable. I hadn't thought of how he'd react to the unveiling of the swan. I hadn't thought through any of their reactions very well, In case you weren't getting this. I wanted Katie to ask me out, but I didn't want to lose my relationship, such as it was, with everybody else. Like The Price Is Right: I wanted to come as close as I could to winning Katie without going over.

"Team calisthenics," Cook called. I understood he wanted to change the subject, but I hoped we could skip team calisthenics now that we were all grown up. Mr. Fitch used to make us do push-ups together before we went out. The stronger we were, the less likely we were to get hurt. When my brother and Effy got their boater's licenses and we started going without Mr. Fitch, we kept doing push-ups before every wakeboard outing. It was a good way for the rest of the girls and my brother to keep Emily and me in our places.

No hesitation, no complaint - this was part of the game. I dropped on my hands on the concrete wharf just as fast as the rest of them, and started doing push-ups. All five of us did push-ups, heads close together, with limited grunting at first. And absolutely no grunting from me or from Emily. We stayed in shape cause we cared about calisthenics.

And because we were both in training for sports. Emily might be the head cheerleader this year. I was just trying not to get kicked off the tennis team by an incoming freshman. My game was okay, but I was nowhere near as good as Mini and Grace, who had just graduated. Or Panda, who would be team captain this year.

Plus, there was an unfortunate incident last year I didn't train all winter, got to our first meet, overexerted myself, and barfed on the court. I went on to win that match 6-2, 6-1, but nobody seemed to remember that part. Since then I'd made sure to stay in shape. Today I held my own in push-ups.

After about fifty, I was nowhere near my limit. Eff's grunting increased. I tried to concentrate on my own self but Effy was hard to ignore. Her face turned very purple. Her arms trembled, and finally she collapsed on her bare stomach. My brother hadn't trembled or grunted as much, but he took the opportunity to lie down on his stomach, too, hoping no one would notice as Effy drew the fire.

Effy cursed and said, "I don't know why I can't get my ass in gear today."

Between push-ups, I breathed, "About twelve ounces too much party for the both of you."

Effy scrambled towards me. I knew I was in trouble, but it was too late to get up and run. One solid arm circled my waist. With her other arm, She held my legs so tightly I couldn't wiggle or, better yet, kick her in the gut. She took two steps toward the end of the wharf.

I managed not to plead or scream. After almost sixteen years with a brother, I had a lot of control over my natural girl reactions. It wasn't until she pitched me off that I remembered I did want to react like a girl today. Then, as I hit the water, I realized I hadn't screened this swimming area for Bryzoa. "Eeee-"

I plunged in.

Almost before my toes hit the bottom, I was pushing up through the water, toward the sunbeams and the platform on the back of the boat, which was less likely to harbor Bryzoa than any part of the concrete wharf. Ugh, ugh, ugh, I could almost feel a heinous mass squishing past my skin- but I made it safely to the surface.

And I slapped myself mentally as I climbed up on the platform. If I'd pulled off my new siren act, Effy wouldn't have tossed me in the lake. I would have been too delicate and too haughty. She wouldn't have dared touch me. On the other hand, she did recognize that I was a girl, on some level. Emily, she would have just shoved me instead of picking me up.

By the time I stood on the platform, I remembered I was now wearing a wet bikini. I collected myself enough to make jumping down in the boat look halfway svelte. But nobody was looking at me anymore. Effy and Cook now stood over Emily and Katie still doing push-ups.

Emily, eyes on concrete, kept pushing herself up in an even rhythm. Katie watched

Emily with a little smile and gritted teeth, Katie turning redder and redder. The muscles on Katie's tan arms trembled.

Oh, God, Katie was going to lose


	3. Chapter 3

**Thanks for the reviews guys! I'm glad that some people are reading this because I wasn't too sure if anyone would like this. **

Chapter 3

Katie fell on the concrete with a groan, followed by eleven choice curse words. Em kept doing push-ups, probably because these games we played tended to change without warning. Katie might claim that Emily was required to do five more push-ups per minute younger. Emily was no fool. She made sure. Katie stood, and Emily was still doing push-ups.

"We've created a monster," Cook said. Emily did one last push-up for good measure and stood up slowly. She clapped her hands together to brush off the dust. And then - don't do it, Emily, don't make Katie any angrier than she already is - she gave Katie a grin.

"Holy shit!" shouted Effy. "You know what else, Emily has bigger tits! Stand side to side and let me make sure."

Katie refused to stand side to side with Emily. They goaded her and called her names. So Katie and Emily stood side to side. Sure enough, Katie was a bit taller, as always, but Emily was a size bigger.

Emily turned and gave Katie that grim look with dropped jaw, trying not to laugh. "I have bigger tits."

"Ohhhhhh!" Effy and Cook moaned like Emily had gotten in a good punch on Katie in one of their boxing matches.

Panda and some other girls on tennis team had told me they were so jealous of me growing up around lesbians, because I had a window into how they thought. This, my friends, was the deep, dark secret. The pussy jokes went on and on as if I weren't there, or as if I didn't understand them. I wasn't sure which was worse.

Katie smiled, wincing only a little when they shoved her. She would keep smiling no matter what they said to her. This was one of the many things I loved about Katie. Surely the others knew that they couldn't break her. They would try anyway.

I was a little concerned about what Katie would do to Emily later. Katie didn't let Emily get away with stuff like that. But I supposed that was Emily's business, the tosser.

Disgusted, I sat in the boat with my back to them. When they ran out of pussy jokes for the moment - they would think of more as the afternoon wore on, trust me - they piled into the boat and proceeded to argue about who got to drive first. The consensus was that Katie could drive first as a consolation prize because she was a loser.

There was no question about me driving. I got my boater's license when I turned fifteen, just like they did. The problem was I didn't know my left from my right. This was their fault, really. They taught me to water ski when I was five years old. Nobody thought I'd get up and stay up on the first try, so I wasn't properly instructed on the dismount. I couldn't steer. Too terrified to drop the rope, I ran into the dock and broke my arm.

My right arm. At the time, my brain must have been designing the circuitry that told me left from right. Because since then, I'd never been able to hear Katie yell, "Go left!" or Cook holler, "Turn to the right!" without thinking, 'okay, I broke my right arm. This is my right arm. They want me to turn this way,' by which time I had missed the turn, or run the girl I was towing on the wakeboard into a tree. We found this out the hard way last summer, the first time I tried to pull Emily.

Katie started the engine and putted through the marina waters, and Emily had the nerve to plop onto the seat across the aisle from me. Katie reached the end of the idle zone and cranked the boat into top speed. Emily called to me so softly I could barely catch her words over the motor, "Close your legs."

"What for? I waxed!" I looked down to make sure. This was okay now, because Katie was facing the other way and couldn't hear me in the din. Indeed, I was clean. I spread my legs even wider, put my arms on the back of the seat, and generally took up as much room as possible, like a boy. I glanced back over at Emily. "Does it make you uncomfortable for me to sit this way?"

She watched me warily. "Yes."

"May I suggest that this is your problem and not mine?"

She licked her lips and bent toward me. "If it keeps Katie from asking you out, it's going to be your problem, and you're going to make it my problem."

"Speaking of which," I said, crossing my legs like a girl. "Thanks for staying out of my way. How the hell am I supposed to get Katie to ask me out when she's all pissy?"

"You wanted me to lose to her at team calisthenics? That was too good to miss."

"You didn't have to win by quite so much, Emily. You knew I needed her in a good mood. You didn't have to rub it in."

Emily grinned. "And you wanted me to stop growing?"

"Do not make a joke about your size. If you can't think of anything to talk about besides your boobs, please say nothing at all."

So we sat in silence until Katie stopped the boat in the middle of the lake. Cook put on his life vest, sat on the platform, slipped his feet into the binding on his wakeboard, and hopped into the water.

He and Effy had been the ones to discover wakeboarding, and they did it first while the rest of us were still water skiing. To look at them today, you'd think that they'd never gotten the hang of it. Cook face planted twice in his twenty minute turn. Effy had a hard time getting up. Frankly, I was beginning to worry.

Since we were kids, we'd spent every afternoon skiing and wakeboarding behind the Fitch's Marina boat as advertisement for business. Katie had even convinced Rob to go all out with a boat made especially for wakeboarding, which made even bigger waves. Bars arched over the boat for attaching the towrope, and speakers on the bars blasted Nickelback like music came on automatically with the boat motor. (Once I'd brought the first Kelly Clarkson album and asked to play it instead of Nickelback while we wake boarded. They'd laughed in my face and called me Miss Independent for months.)

We held a special wakeboarding exhibition when the lake was crowded. But our show during the Crappy festival in two weeks was the most important, because sales of boats and equipment at the marina were highest near the beginning of the summer. Okay, it was actually the Crappie Festival. Crappie is a kind of fish, pronounced more like croppie. The Crappie Festival had a Crappie Queen and a Crappie Bake-Off and a Crappie toss, in which folks competed to throw a dead fish farthest down the lakeshore. Katie started calling it the Crappy Festival, which sounded like a lot more fun.

But the festival would be no fun at all if we kept wakeboarding like this! None of us had been out on the water since early September last year, but come on. I never expected Effy and Cook to be this awful on their first time out. And since Katie would be watching me now, I hoped I broke the cycle.

I strapped a life vest over my bikini. Such a pity to cover my shapely body (snort). Then I tied my feet tightly into the bindings attached to my board. I hopped into the water, wakeboard and all, and assumed the position.

I wished Cook would putter the boat away from me a little faster. The wakeboard floated on its side in front of me as I crouched behind it with my knees spread. Talk about needing to close my legs! The embarrassing stance had caused me to get up too quickly and face-plant more times than I cared to count, just to save myself a few seconds of the girls cracking jokes about me that I couldn't hear.

Not today. I relaxed in the water. Anyone care for an eyeful? I parted my knees and gave Emily the okay sign. She was spotting. Katie and Effy watched me, too, as concerned as I was that we all sucked and Rob would pull the plug on our daily outing. No pressure. When Cook finally got around to opening up the engine, I let the boat pull me up and relaxed into the adrenaline rush.

Wakeboarding was pretty simple. I stood on the wakeboard like a skateboard, and held onto the rope as if I was waterskiing. The boat motor left a triangular wake behind it as the boat moved through the water. I moved outside it by going over one of the small waves. Then I turned back inward and used one wave as a skateboarding ramp to take off. I sailed over the wake, and used the opposite wake as a ramp to land.

After a few minutes I mostly forgot about the girls, even Katie. The drone of the motor would do that like nothing else: put me in this different zone. Even though I was connected by a rope to the boat and the outside world, I was all alone with myself. I just enjoyed the sun and the water and the wakeboard.

My intention all along had been to get my wakeboarding legs back this first day. Maybe I'd do tricks when we went out the next day. I didn't want to get too cocky and bust ass in front of Katie. But as I got more comfortable and forgot to care, I tried a few standbys - a front flip, a scarecrow. There was no busting of ass. So I tried a backroll. And landed it solidly.

Now I get cocky. I did a heelside backroll with a nosegrab. This meant that in the middle of the flip, I let go of the rope handle with one hand, reached down, and grabbed the front of the board. It served no purpose in the trick except to look impressive, like, 'This only appears to be a difficult trick. I have all the time in the world. I will grab the board. Yawn.' And I landed it. This was getting too good to be true.

Cook spun the boat around just before we reached the graffiti covered highway bridge that spanned the lake. Effy had spray painted her name and her girlfriend's name on the bridge, alongside all the other couples' names and over the faded ones. Cook, genius that he is, had tried to paint 'Fuck McGillicuddy' but ran out of room on that section of the bridge.

Katie wisely never painted her girlfriends' names. She would have had to change them too often. For my part, I was very thankful that when most of this spray-painting action was going on last summer, I was still too weak to reach over from the pile and haul myself up on the main part of the bridge. I probably had the height and the upper body strength now, and I prayed none of the girls pointed this out. Then I'd have to spray-paint NAOMI LOVES KATIE on the bridge. And move to America.

It was kind of strange Emily hadn't spray-painted her name with Mandy's in the past few weeks. Maybe she didn't consider it daring enough, if Effy had managed to do it. Emily had painted red letters in the very center of the bridge, WASH ME. The bridge was a very big part of our lake experience. Wakeboarding underneath it would have been cool. But driving a boat under the bridge while towing a wakeboarder was dangerous. Emily had been the one to discover this (seventh grade).

Cook pointed the boat for the rail. A few summers ago, Effy and Cook had pulled the guts out of an old pontoon boat that also said Fitch's Marina down the side. They anchored it near the shore and built a rail sticking out from it, topped with PVC pipe. You could really hurt yourself on this contraption (Emily: eighth grade) but my ride was going great, and I was in the groove. I zoomed far out from the wakeboarding boat, popped up onto the rail, slid across it on the board, and landed nice and soft in the water on the other end.

Emily raised both fists at me. (Nice, but no love from Katie?) If Emily yelled, I couldn't hear her over the boat motor. What I could hear as Cook paralleled the shoreline was the Tomones and the Fitzgeralds, our neighbors hanging out on their docks. They came out to watch us practice a lot of afternoons. Cha- Ching! Two sales we'd as good as made for Fitch's Marina when their kids got a little older.

Then came my family's dock, The Fitch's dock, and finally the marina. Dad had gotten home from work, I saw. He and Rob sat in lawn chairs on the marina dock, holding beers. I really shouldn't have done this if I was trying to be ladylike. But the opportunity was too perfect to resist, and old habits die hard. I arced way out from the wake, aiming for the dock.

My dad saw me coming and knew exactly what was going to happen. He jumped from his chair and jogged up the stairs, toward the shore, so I wouldn't ruin his business suit. His tie flapped over his shoulder. He didn't warn Rob, who took a sip of beer as I slid past, spraying water probably fifteen feet in the air behind me.

The wall of water smacked right on top of him. I didn't want to turn my head to look, fall, and ruin the effect (chicken salad on bikini, hello). But I saw him out of the corner of my eye, T-shirt and shorts soaked, beer halted in mid-air.

Katie probably heard me cackling all the way up in the boat. Sex-y. I tried to calm myself and concentrate. I wanted to try an air raley, which I'd been working up to last summer but never landed. If there was one good reason for Katie to never ask me out, it was that she couldn't shake the memory of me wiping out after an air raley. Done correctly, I would hang in the air behind the boat for a few seconds with the board above my head. I would then sail down the opposite wake and land sweetly. Done incorrectly, it was a high-speed belly flop.

When I busted ass (or tummy), Katie and the others would make fun of me for the rest of the boat ride, and would spread it around their party that night. But they were so far away in the toy boat, and the drone of the motor was like a bubble around me. Nothing could hurt me in here.

I gestured upward, which told Emily to tell Cook to speed up. She knew what I planned to do and shook her head at me. What a pain, to stop the boat and argue with her about it. She didn't consult anyone before she tried a trick and busted ass. If we stopped, Katie would insist that my turn was over, and I'd be done for the day. I wasn't done. So I nodded my head vigorously. Emily shook her finger at me scolding. Then she turned around and spoke to Cook.

The drone pitched higher as the boat sped up. I relaxed, relaxed, relaxed and let the boat and the wave do the work for me. My muscles remembered what they tried to do last summer, and this time they were able to do it. I caught miles of air, a huge thrill, and one glance at the boat: three girls, and Cook, with their mouths open. Then I almost panicked when my board hit its high point behind me. Almost - but I kept myself together. I rode gravity down the opposite wave.

Immediately I arced out and back to pick up speed, and did a 360 with a grab. Landed it. Then a 540. Landed it.

I thought I might be pushing my luck. I'd probably break my leg climbing back into the boat. Also, I didn't want my arms to be so sore the next day that I couldn't ride at all. I signaled to Emily that I was stopping and dropped the rope. The handle skipped away from me across the surface of the lake.

As the echo of the motor faded away and I sank into the warm water, I could hear them clapping for me.

All four of them, standing up in the boat, facing me, applauding me and cheering for me. "Yaaaaaaay, Junior!" I had never been so happy in my life.

And it got better.

**Again, thanks for the reviews. A couple more would boost my confidence. So, review!**


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I bent over in the water to loosen the bindings, slipped my feet out, and kicked my way back to the boat with my board floating in front of me. As I pulled myself up on the platform, Katie put one hand out to help me - totally unnecessary, since I'd climbed up on the platform a thousand times before with no help.

"I taught her everything she knows," she said loudly enough for the others to hear, but only looking at me. She gave me her beautiful smile, a secret smile for the two of us to share, and sat down again.

"That's bullshit," Effy said.

"I was the one who helped her most with the air raley last summer," Cook said.

"Tough act to follow," Emily told me, shrugging on her life vest. I would have treasured this comment forever if I hadn't been high on Katie.

But I was. So I peeled off my life vest and dropped it on the floor of the boat, sat daintily in the seat where Emily had been, and crossed my legs. Like my fingers had a mind of their own, they bent inward and rubbed my palm where Katie had touched me. I tingled all over again at the thought. Or maybe I tingled because my body was still jacked from how hard I'd worked my muscles out on the water. Either way, I felt so lovely and sated just then, with the sun in my eyes. I wished Emily wasn't jumping in for her turn.

Because watching Emily wakeboard was not relaxing. She wasn't careful when wake boarding. Or in general. She was the opposite of careful. She would do anything on a dare, so Katie and Effy dared her a lot. My role in the game was to run and tell their mom. If I'd been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Emily from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites.

Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Fitch let us wake board for the marina. But we'd come to wake boarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, _Look__at__the__very__young__children__on__water__skis!__How__adorable._One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Emily waterskiing double, each of us holding up a British flag. It's okay for you to gag now, I can take it.

But Mr. Fitch was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Emily broke her collarbone, Mr. Fitch put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wake board and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Emily cleaned the boat a lot last summer.

At the end of the rope, Emily signaled that she was ready to go. I told Effy, who as driving now. She started too slow, and Emily tried to get up too fast. "Down," I called.

"Come on, LD," Katie muttered as if Emily were right in front of her. Even though I'd heard this joke one billion times and didn't think it was funny, I made sure to look over at Katie and laugh until she saw me laughing She laughed too.

Emily had attention deficit disorder. The girls actually called Emily ADD to her face. They called her LD (for Learning Disability). They called her SAS (for Short Attention Span) and Sassy and Sassafras. They told her the short bus was coming for her. She had a prescription to help her concentrate in school, but she refused to take it because it made her feel dead. In other words, she was perfectly happy with ADD. Or she _would _have been, if the girls had left her alone about it.

Sometimes I thought she took stupid risks to make up for being slow in school. Or maybe she was just like that. The skull and crossbones pendant was perfect for her. The girls told her if she improved her grades, when she graduated she could apply to pirate school.

Effy brought the boat around and straightened the rope. I told her Emily was ready to go. This time they got it right. Emily got up. Emily did a turn to blind, touched down on the edge of her board, and miraculously managed not to fall.

"Good save!" Cook shouted from the front of the bow.

"Dumb luck," Katie said.

I smiled a Katie. I would feel guilty later about laughing, as I always did when I laughed at Katie's mean jokes. But while I was there with her, she was so charming, and I couldn't help but laugh.

When I looked back at Emily again, she was in the middle of a 540 to blind, which was fine, but for the love of God, she hardly had time to land before she hit the rails on the pontoon boat. I waved to get her attention, then swiped my finger across my throat: _cut__it__out._She signaled for me to speed up.

I told Effy, "Emily would like to spend this summer in traction. Speed up."

I turned back around in my seat to watch Emily again. Katie was leaning toward me in her seat, watching me."Cold?" she asked me.

Pardon? Yeah, the thirty two degree afternoon always gave me a chill I couldn't shake. But one delicate, haughty brain cell in the back of my mind told me she was flirting with me and I should feign helplessness.

"I'm freezing!" I squealed. And just like that, Katie Fitch moved across to my side of the aisle and scooted against me in my seat until I made room for her. She put her hot bare arm around my bare shoulder. And I fainted.

No, I didn't really. But I did feel dazed, perhaps from the hyperventilation. Suddenly I realized Emily had been gesturing wildly at me for several seconds without it even registering with me. She signaled me to slow down and I told Effy.

Emily did a front flip. Katie said in my ear, "Gosh, I've never seen anyone do that before. Makes me want to buy a wake board from Fitch's Marina!" I giggled. Emily signaled me to slow down more, and I told Effy.

Emily did a back roll with a grab. Katie put her bare hand on my knee and whispered, "You don't believe Emily's bigger than me, do you?"

This time I missed a beat. I was used to this humor. But Katie was directing this humor at me, flirting with me? It seemed unlikely that Stage Two: Bikini had worked so quickly. Was I reading her wrong? Emily gave me the thumbs down, and I told Effy to slow the boat one more time.

Just as I turned back around, Emily launched into what only could be an S-bend, which was absolutely impossible to land with the boat going this slowly.

Katie, Cook and I all swore at once, and watched Emily's long, slow death splash with interest and resignation.

"Down," I called to Effy.

Katie gave me the funniest look that said _no__shit._I laughed out loud. She smiled again as she found her board and slipped over the back of the boat to the platform.

Emily emerged from the depths, vaulted over the side of the boat, and stood close to my seat so she dripped on my formerly comfy, sun-dried self. She commented, "S-bend or what?"

"Or what?" Effy said. "What the fuck were you doing, trying it that slow?"

"Sometimes I want to try new things," Emily said. "Sometimes I want to do things I know are bad for me, just for fun and profit. Don't you, Naomi?"

I gazed up at her and gave her a look that said, _Stay __out __of __my __net, __little __dolphin._She grinned right back at me, defiant.

"Yeah, Ems," I said. "Sometimes I like to stick my finger in a light socket to see what will happen."

She pointed at me. "Exactly." Without another word to me, she took off her life vest and handed it to Katie.

Katie got up on her first try without any trouble. She never attempted any tricks she couldn't do perfectly. We always ended the exhibition with her. We could count on her to do the impressive moves, but nothing she couldn't land.

That's why I watched in disbelief when, after a few textbook flips, she launched an air raley. Surely she wasn't doing it just because I'd landed one. Or maybe she was, and this was her way of testing me. Anything I could do she could do better.

Except she couldn't. She panicked at the peak of the trick. Overcorrecting, she did lose her balance. She face-planted in the lake, rocking the pontoon boat with the splash.

"Down," called Effy, who was spotting.

"I'll say," agreed Cook.

Emily, who was driving now, brought the boat around. When she cut the motor and the Nickelback, she, Effy and Cook hooted and clapped for Katie almost as hard as they'd clapped for me. I wished they would quit. I didn't want Katie mad. Flirting with her was turning out to be a lot harder than I'd thought.

Katie grinned at them from the water. Even though her turn hadn't been very long, clearly she'd had enough. She took off her life vest and tossed it up into the boat. Then she disappeared under the surface.

"What's she doing?" I asked, leaning over the side of the boat, searching for her beneath the water. If the tow rope had gotten tangled, she might need help. And someone would need to go in the water with her, perhaps sliding against her down where no one else could see.

"Boo!" A handful of bryozoa rushed up at me from the lake.

I screamed (for once I didn't have to think about this girl reaction) and fell backward into the boat. Katie hefted herself over the side with one arm, holding the bryozoa high in the other hand. It dripped green slime through her fingers. She came after me.

I squealed again. It was unbelievingly fantastic that she was flirting with me, but bryozoa was involved. Was it worth it? No. I paused on the side of the boat, ready to jump back into the water myself. She might chase me around the lake with bryozoa, but at least it could be diluted. On second thought, I didn't particularly want to jump into the very waters the bryozoa had come from.

Katie solved the problem for me. She slipped behind me and showed me she was holding the ties of my bikini in her free hand. If I jumped, Katie would take possession of my bikini top.

I had thought about double knotting my bikini. I'd hoped against hope that Stage Two: Bikini would work, and that Katie might try something like this. Of course, I didn't really want my top to come off in front of everyone. Nay, in front of anyone. But I'd checked the double knots in the mirror. They'd looked... well, double knotted, for protection, sort of like wearing a turtleneck to the prom. I'd retied the strings normally.

Now I wished I'd double knotted after all. Katie brought the dripping slime closer to my shoulder. "Go ahead and jump," she said, twisting my bikini ties in her fingers.

"Katie," came Cook's voice in warning. This surprised me. Cook had never taken up for me before. Of course, none of the girls had ever crossed this particular line.

But that was nothing compared to the surprise when the bryozoa suddenly lobbed out of Katie's hand, sailed through the air, and plopped into the lake. Emily, standing behind her, must have shoved her arm.

Which meant I owed Emily my gratitude for saving me. Except I didn't want her to save me from Katie, and I thought I'd made that clear. Saving me from Katie with bryozoa... that was a more iffy proposition. I wasn't sure whether I should give Emily the little dolphin look again when our eyes met. But it didn't matter. When I turned around, she was already stepping over Effy's legs to return to the driver's seat.

Katie was watching me, though. And she wiped the bryozoa residue from her hand across my stomach. This was the third time a girl had ever touched my stomach and I'd had enough.

Through gritted teeth, like any extra movement would spread the bryozoa further across my skin, I told her, "I like you less than I did." I bailed over the side of the boat - the side opposite where the bryozoa had returned to its native habitat. Deep in the water, I scrubbed at my stomach with both hands. A combination of bryozoa waste and Katie germs: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Leaning toward worst, because now I had slime on my hands. Or maybe this was psychosomatic. Holding my hands open in front of me in the water, I didn't see any slime. I rubbed my hands together anyway.

Something dove into the water beside me in a rush of bubbles. I came up for air. Katie surfaced, too, tossing sparkling drops of water from her hair. "You still like me a lot, though, right?"

"No biggie. Green is the new black." Giving up on getting clean, I swam a few strokes back toward the platform to get out again. What I needed was a shower with chlorinated water and disinfectant soap. I might need to bubble out my bellybutton with hydrogen peroxide.

"What if I made it up to you?" She splashed close behind me. "What if I helped you get clean? We don't want you dirty." She moved both hands around me under the water, and up and down across my stomach.

It was the fourth time a girl had touched my stomach! And it was very awkward. She bobbed so close behind me that I had a hard time treading water without kicking her. I needed to choose between flirting and breathing.

Effy and Cook leaned over the side of the boat and gaped at us, which didn't help matters. I'd been afraid of this. Flirting with Katie was no fun if the others acted like we were lepers. Well, okay, it was fun, but not as fun as it was supposed to be.

Obviously, I would need to give Cook a _little __dolphin _talk. I wasn't sure I could do this with Effy - Effy and I didn't have heart to heart conversations - but I might need to make an exception, if she continued to watch us like we were a dirty movie on Pay-Per-View (which I'd also seen a lot of. Life with Cook).

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-

Katie and I started and turned toward the boat. Still behind the steering wheel, Emily had her chin in her hand and her elbow on the horn.

-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Bollocks! I turned around to face Katie and gave her a wry smile, but she'd already taken her hands away from my stomach. The horn had really ruined the mood.

-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Katie hauled herself up onto the platform. I followed close behind her, and she put out a hand to help me. Effy and Cook yelled at Emily.

-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

"Oh!" Emily said as if she's had no idea she'd been laying on the horn. She looked at her elbow like it belonged to someone else.

I was in the boat with Katie now, and she was still holding my hand. Or, maybe I was still clinging to her hand, but this was a question of semantics. In any case, I pulled her by the hand past the others to the bow. We didn't have privacy. There was no privacy on a wake boarding boat. At least we had the boat's windshield between us and the others.

As I turned to sit down on the bench, I stuck my tongue at Emily behind the windshield. She crossed her eyes at me.

Katie sat very close to me again. She pretended to yawn and stretch, then settle her arm around my waist. I smiled at her and tried to think of something to say. After years of her being vaguely pleasant to me but basically ignoring me, it had never occurred to me that we had nothing in common but wake boarding - and I suspected wake boarding might be a touchy subject right now. We didn't need to talk. She kept her arm around me for the short ride back to the marina.

Instead of driving straight to the wharf where we usually parked the boat, Emily slowed at the marina dock so the girls could mock Mr. Fitch, who hadn't moved from the position he'd been in when I splashed him, except he'd started in on another beer. The girls told him her was all washed up and he should enter a wet T-shirt contest with that figure, and so forth. Cook called to Dad, "Nice save, Pops."

"Hey." Dad tipped his beer to us "You've got to be fast with Naomi around."

"I have to say, young lady," grumbled Mr. Fitch. "I was very impressed with all your shenanigans. Right up to the point I got doused. I want you to plan to close the Crappie Festival show until further notice."

Which meant, _Until __you __screw __up._That was okay. He'd told me I was better than his daughters for once in my life! I turned to Katie and beamed so big that my cheeks hurt.

Katie squinted into the sun, wearing that strange, fixed smile. Even Cook and Effy gave each other puzzled looks rather than congratulating me again. Only Emily met my eyes. She shook her head at me.

Oh, fuck. Bugger. Holy Crappie Festival! I had upset the natural order. After Emily had already upset the natural order in team calisthenics. I should have thought all of this through better.

Katie began, "But I didn't even get a chance to-"

"I saw what happened," Mr. Fitch told her. "You had your chance. The Big Kahuna has spoken."

"Race you to the wharf," Emily called. Mr. Fitch said something to my dad, put down his beer, and tried to hurl himself up the steps to the marina faster than Emily idled the boat. The girls were dumbasses, and it was genetic. Emily let Mr. Fitch win by half a length, touching the bow of the boat to the padded edge of the wharf just after Mr. Fitch dashed past. The girls howled, and someone threw a couple of bills at Mr. Fitch. He picked up each bill like it mattered and limped back down the stairs toward my dad.

Then Katie jumped out of the bow to tie the boat. Her, Effy, and Cook tried to trip each other as they took armfuls of equipment into the warehouse with them. No one gave me a singe backward glance.

Emily cut the engine. "Now you've screwed up."

"How?" I asked casually, stepping out of the boat. "You think Katie won't want to go out with me now that I've taken her spot in the show?"

Emily just looked at me. That's exactly what she thought. I was getting tired of her warnings about Katie. I gathered my clothes and my backpack, turned on my heel, and flounced away. Which was fairly ineffective with bare feet, on a rough concrete wharf.

"You'll see at the party tonight," Emily called after me.

"No, you'll see," I threw over my shoulder. Katie and her pride would prove no match for Stage Three: Slinky Cleavage Revealing Top.


	5. Chapter 5

**I apologize for this being a short update, and for that I promise I will update again either tomorrow or the day after that. I mean, only if you guys want it though. Haha so review and let me know.**

Chapter 5

As I walked home, balancing on the seawall that kept the Fitch's yard and my yard from falling into the lake, my cellphone rang. I pulled it out of my backpack without hurrying. The only people who ever called me were my dad, Cook, assorted Fitches to tell me to come early or late to work (including Katie, but she always sounded grumpy that she had to call me, so it wasn't as big a thrill as you'd think), Panda to tell me to come early or late to tennis practice, and Kieran. I glanced at the caller ID screen and clicked the phone on. "What's up, Kieran?" From the time Mom died until I was eleven, Kieran had hung out in the background of my life.

"I'm on the dock," he said.

I peered across the lake and waved to him. I could hardly make him out at that distance, against the trees that sheltered the Jones' house, where he nannied now. I could only see his dirty robe.

"The little fuckers and I watched the last part of your wake boarding run," he said. "You've improved so much since last year!"

"Thanks! But that's not why you called, you're dying to know what happened with Katie."

Kieran was in on my Life Makeover. Not the fashion part - I mean, look at him. He hadn't ever given me advice on what to do. I wandered into the Jones' house every week or so and told him how my plan was shaping up, and he told me I was being ridiculous and it would never work. I guess I went to him because I wanted to hear some motherly input, as fucked as that may sound. We had the perfect relationship. He wasn't really my parent, so I could listen to his input and then do the opposite. The difference between us and real parents was that I didn't get in trouble for this.

"Let me guess," he said. "When Katie saw you in a bikini, she acted monumentally cozy to you. Therefore you expect her to profess her love. You honestly did. And she didn't do a thing." I told him what had really happened.

"What?" he said when I told him Emily beat Katie at calisthenics. "What?" he said when I told him I landed an air raley. "What?" he said when I told him Katie wiped out. As I got to the part about Katie touching my stomach repeatedly, he interrupted me so often that I had to pitch a bitch fit. I threw the phone down to the grass, cupped my hands around my mouth, and hollered across the lake, "Let. Me. Finish!" _Inish,__Inish,__Inish,_said my echo. I picked up the phone and told him the rest of the story, ending with my plan to implement Stage Three that night.

"But you don't really think wearing a low cut top to the girls' party will solve all your problems, do you?" he asked.

"Of course not. I think wearing a low cut top to the girls' party will show Katie I'm ready for her."

"Naomi, no girl is ever ready for a girl like Katie."

Mr. Fitch let the girls let the girls throw a party at their house every Friday night during the summers. He reasoned that if they were home, they weren't out drag racing the pink truck against Jenna's volvo. So I'd been to a million of these parties. It should have been old hat. Yet it was new hat. I had put on my seductress bonnet. Ha! Not really. This would have dented my hair, which I'd blown out long, straight and bryozoa free.

We'd had a lot of rain in May, which made the lake full, the grass lush, the trees happy, and the ground soft. Walking through my yard into the Fitch's yard in high heels was like wading in the lake where the sand was deep, feet sinking with every step. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet in _Pride __and __Prejudice_ (tenth grade English) hiking through pastures to a house party, her petticoat six inches deep in mud. And here was Emily getting her groove on with Mandy under a massive oak tree.

I did a double take. Emily pressed Mandy against the tree, kissing her. Deeply.

This shouldn't have surprised me. They'd been together for a month. I'm sure they've already fucked. I'd seen them kiss before, a quick peck. I'd just never seen them kiss like this.

Knowing Emily, I would have thought her love life would be like every other aspect of her life: dangerous. It started that way. Since secondary school, she'd followed in Katie's footsteps, coming on to a different girl every week. I had imagined this would continue as Emily got older. The only difference between Emily and Katie would be that Emily would get in a lot of physical fights with the girls' ex-girlfriends in the movie theater parking lot, and occasionally I would hear a rumor about a drive-by that she would swear wasn't true.

Instead, she'd been with Mandy for a month. A whole month. It seemed stable. Even boring. Maybe her own budding womanhood had brought out the pirate in her.

She broke the kiss, turned, and stared at me as if I had no right to watch what was going on in a public place. That's when I realized I was staring at them. Standing still in the middle of the yard, just staring, my heels settling in the dirt. Watching her kiss Mandy bothered me, but I couldn't put my finger on why. It had never occurred to me to be jealous of Mandy before. Suddenly I was burning with jealousy, sweating in the humid night. There was nothing to do but wade to the front porch of her house.

I rang the doorbell.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes, I pressed my ear to the door and rang the doorbell again. I definitely heard the chime of the doorbell inside, the bass beat from the stereo, and laughter. Why didn't someone come to the door? Maybe they had a camera on me right now and everybody at the party was watching me on TV, taking bets on how long I'd stand there before wading home. I peered into the top corners of the porch for a camera.

Why hadn't I gone with Cook when he told me he was leaving the house, like usual? He was a dork, but at least he was totally comfortable in social situations, like Dad. Comfortable, or oblivious, which was the same thing.

The door swung open, revealing Panda. "Naoms! I figured someone better open this door, because you obviously weren't going to. Why'd you ring the doorbell? No one's ringing the doorbell. They just walk right in. Besides, don't you practically live here?"

Did I? I supposed I knew the territory, and I always hoped someone in the house noticed me. This sounded less like I was a member of the family and more like I was a stray dog. I changed the subject. "What are you doing here? Are you friends with Katie or Emily or Effy?"

She knitted her eyebrows at me. "I'm friends with you."

"Right." I said. Was she? I fought the urge to look behind me, like she'd actually been talking to someone over my shoulder the whole time.

"Want to play tennis tomorrow night, after it's cooled off a little?" she asked.

"Sure," I said before I thought. Panda and I played tennis all the time in school. Why not out of school, too? After I'd answered, I realized that Katie would ask me out for tomorrow night and I wouldn't be able to go out with her. Right. I wasn't lucky enough to have problems like that. Silly me.

We walked back into the party. Fluttering my eyelashes, I could hardly believe my luck. Usually at parties I wandered in alone and hoped someone took pity and talked to me. Then, by degrees, I faded into the shadows. Tonight I was entering the party with someone.

Of course, the instant we hit the wall of crowd and sound, she pointed across the dark room and shouted above the music, "I'd completely forgotten Cook was coming back from Uni! I'm going to say hi." The two people I felt most comfortable hanging with, hanging with each other instead!

I watched Panda weave between knots of people to hug Cook. I thought about going after her. But then I might look like I didn't want her to leave me by myself because I wasn't good at talking to people at parties. Imagine!

Suddenly things looked way, way up. I saw Katie in the darkness, next to the stairs, with her back to me. She stood a few inches shorter than her friends who'd just graduated too, who surrounded her. Katie was always surrounded.

As I crossed the room to her, people kept stepping in my way, wanting to say hey and have conversations with me, of all things. The one time I wasn't interested in being well-liked. I made small talk, and resumed my uphill trek across the room, only to have someone else stop me.

By the time I finally reached her, my heart pounded. But it was now or never. I made myself grin at her friends as I slid my hand across her T-shirt, feeling her hard stomach underneath the cotton. I almost flinched at how good and how intimate it felt, but through the marvel of my own willpower, I did not flinch. I lay my head playfully across her chest, as I'd seen girls do when they claim to be just friends with a guy but everyone whispered something more was going on.

I half expected her to shout, "Get off me!" and shove me away. Not because Katie would ever do this to a girl - she had more charming ways of extricating herself from cretins - but because my life had generally been a large series of mortifications, and Katie shouting in alarm at my embrace would fit right in. The other half of me expected her to chuckle gently, but not make a move of her own quite yet. It might take her awhile to get used to the new me.

She didn't chuckle. She didn't shove me away. She did exactly what she was supposed to. She slipped her arm around my waist and drew me closer against her warm body. I felt her nodding at something one of the guys said about football, but she didn't say a word to me or anyone. As if a greeting like this from me were the most natural thing in the world. She smelled even better than usual, too, just a hint of perfume. A flowery scent with the undertones of candy and fruit.

I snuggled against her, nose closer to her hair, and enjoyed a few more seconds of this tingling paradise. What heaven if my whole summer could be like this-

Her low voice vibrating through my body, she asked her friends, "Have you been watching Arsenal? Nasri or what?"

Fuck, I was hugging Emily!

**So I'm thinking about introducing the Naomily storyline pretty soon. What do you guys think? Review and let me know :)**


	6. Chapter 6

**So I've got the rest of the story mapped out and I'm happy to say that Naomily will start soon! Yay! Someone mentioned that they wondered if this was a Naomily fic and I assure you there will be Naomily. Just maybe not how you expect it at first. **

Chapter 6

I jerked away from her. Almost instantly I realized I shouldn't jerk away from her, because the situation would be slightly less mortifying if I pretended I'd known it was Emily all along.

The damage was done. Worse, I didn't have a chance to burst out the front door and run - not walk, run - all the way home, dash upstairs to the computer in my room, and book a one way ticket to Antarctica, to join the commune there for teenagers too socially challenged for the chess club. Before I could take another step away, she caught my elbow.

"Later," she called over her shoulder to her friends. She pulled me into a corner and leaned in to whisper in my ear, "You're blushing."

I opened my lips. I didn't seem to be taking in enough oxygen through my nose. "I'm sunburned," I breathed.

"You thought I was Katie." The little dolphin was smiling, enjoying my discomfort too much for my taste.

"No, I didn't." I made an effort to slow down my breathing through my nose or mouth. My, uh, bosom was heaving.

And Emily noticed. She focused on the Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top Meant for Another, and slowly, slowly dragged her deep brown eyes up to meet my eyes. "I should have said something. I didn't realize what was happening at first. And then, when I did, I was really enjoying myself."

"Shut up. I didn't think you were Katie."

"You thought I was Katie, because I'm as big as her." She winked at me.

There was no mistaking her for Katie now that I was staring at her. I tried to figure out what had fooled me into assuming it was her without checking her face and the length of her hair. It could have been the fact that she was hanging out with Katie's friends. but something else was different about Emily. She was more confident. More relaxed. More tingle-worthy, like Katie had always been. Those friendly prickles spread across my chest again as Emily's fingers moved a little, reminding me that she still held my arm.

I pulled reluctantly out of her grip. "It's not funny, Emily. What if somebody tells Mandy?"

"She won't mind. She knows we're friends."

From my end, the hug hadn't felt like we were friends. It had felt like we were teetering on the very edge of friendship, about to tumble down a waterfall into depths unknown. With rocks hidden underneath the water. Hard ones.

Or I was about to take a tumble, by myself. She still stood in her living room like always, at the edge of her crowded party, laughing at me, thinking, _The __Slinky __Cleavage-Revealing __Top __has __cut __off __the __blood __supply __to __Naomi __Campbell__'__s __brain._

I reached for her neck. Surprise finally flashed in her eyes - ha! - but she let me pull the skull and crossbones pendant on the leather string out from under her shirt.

"You make sure this shows at all times," I said. " It's your cowbell. It tells me when you're coming." I patted her boobs, which I should not have done if we were really just friends. As we've established, my brain was walking a few steps behind my body and couldn't quite catch up. Face still burning, I took a few steps into the crowd. Where would Katie most likely be? Flirting with Mini and Grace simultaneously, pitting the best friends against each other to see what would happen. But no, they were dancing together at the edge of the crowd in the living room, without Katie.

I stopped suddenly.

Walked back to Emily, who was still watching me.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"You're right," I breathed, my words sinking into the pit of my stomach. "Mandy wouldn't mind us hugging."

"What do you mean?"

"She's in the side yard, making out with Katie."

By the time I'd kicked off my heels and dashed after Emily outside, she'd already gotten herself pinned flat on her back under Katie on the pine needles. I winced as Katie shifted to get better leverage and pressed her forearms across Emily's neck.

"Katie!" I hollered, running all the way around them, trying to find a way in. Sometimes I couldn't pull Katie off Emily, or I even got hit myself. There was a time when I would have tried anyway, disregarding my personal safety. This was back when we were very small and made of rubber. Nowadays, hollering was more effective, unless they were really into it, in which case nothing would work.

They were really into it. Emily managed to kick Katie off of her and get a blow to Katie's chin. Usually they didn't hit each other in the face because Jenna would see the bruises and they'd get in trouble. Emily must be angry enough tonight not to care.

Katie came right back with a punch to Emily's gut. While Emily was absorbing that one, Katie pinned Emily's arm high behind her, tripped her, forced her to the ground, and put one knee on her back. Tonight Katie was more aggressive than usual, intent on causing more pain.

Or - something wasn't right. had they switched shirts? Surely not. Katie didn't let Emily borrow her clothes. Slowly it dawned on me that Katie was Emily and Emily was Katie. For the first time ever, Emily was kicking Katie's ass.

"Holy shit," I said helpfully. "Emily, let her go."

Emily looked up at me, brown eyes shadowed in the dark between the trees, skull and crossbones swinging at her neck.

This gave Katie the opportunity to buck Emily off. She snatched Emily down to the ground and punched her.

"Katie," I said, stepping close over them again. they weren't listening to me. I looked over at Mandy, who had her hands over her mouth and her toes turned in. She looked exactly like a James Bond girl from the pre-Halle Berry era, one of those ditzes who stood safely in the corner and never had a dagger when she needed one, like Honey Ryder, or Plenty O'Toole. "Mandy, a little help?" I called.

She stared at me with big doe eyes like she had no idea what I was talking about. She'd been with Emily for a month and she'd never seen one of her fights with Katie?

"Call Emily off!" I yelled at her. "Or Katie. Whichever one you can get!" Both.

"Katie, stop," she said in a whiny little voice that couldn't have reprimanded a Chihuahua.

"Forget it." I knelt down on the pine needles and shouted directly at Katie and Emily, on their level. "I'll go get your dad. Your dad will come down into your party and cuss at you and spit on the ground in front of your friends."

They didn't even slow down. Whoever was on top had the other in a chokehold so real, the victim was turning red.

"I'll go get your mum!"

Emily gave Katie a final shake and stood up quickly, before Katie could catch her leg and pull her down. "What is the matter with you?" Emily screamed.

Yeah. What was the matter with Katie? She was making out with Mandy, that's what. This was terrible! It blew my theory out of the water that Katie had never asked me out because I was too young for her. Mandy was a year younger than me!

Normally I would have given up, slunk home, and broken out the Garibaldis. I would have immersed myself in _I,__Robot_ for comfort (again) and put it down after every paragraph to wallow in my own outage and loss. She'd flirted with me just that afternoon! She's wiped bryozoa on me!

Luckily, this was no normal night. Tonight I was on a mission. So I reasoned that all wasn't lost. Maybe Katie had flirted with me because she was overcome by my charms and wit, but she didn't see me as the girlfriend type. After all, I'd never been anyone's girlfriend. Mandy didn't have that problem. Katie had watched Mandy go out with Emily for a month.

Katie stood up more slowly than Emily had, taking deep, ragged breaths, clearly hurting. I waited for Emily to decide Katie had had enough of her wrath for now, and turn to Mandy. I looked forward to hearing what Emily would call her, to save me the trouble. But she never even glanced in her direction. She said again, still to Katie, "What the fuck is the matter with you?" Her voice broke.

It was now that Effy and Cook came jogging through the trees, with Panda behind them, and more interested spectators from the party bringing up the rear. Even though the fight was over, Cook stepped between Katie and Emily. A smart move, because these things had been known to flare up again. Which was exactly what the ring of spectators hoped for. Panda tried to catch my eye. I shook my head.

Effy took Emily's face in both hands and peered at the big smudge under her eye. She let Emily go and hissed at me, "Get rid of her in case mum comes down."

I felt honored to be included in the intrigue. but why couldn't Effy ask me to get rid of Katie instead?

That was okay, for now. Emily needed me. I put my hand on her back and said, "Walk away." We moved through the yard, toward the side of the house. A pine needle hung from the back of her hair.

After fifteen paces, her breathing had slowed to almost normal. I felt her start to turn. "Don't look back," I said.

She took a deep, calming breath through her nose. She was fighting the part of the ADD that made her short tempered and impulsive. The part that made her attempt to smash her sister's face in.

"Try not to take it so seriously," I said in what I hoped was a soothing tone. Which was hard for me. Generally I was about as soothing as body lotion with skin conditioners and ground glass, but this was important. "It's probably a temporary thing. She's mad at you for making those tit jokes this afternoon-"

"I didn't start them!"

"You finished them. So she seduced your girlfriend. She said yes because you've been together for a month. Maybe things have gotten into a rut." We passed the corner of the house and reached to side yard, where no one lingering in the front yard could see us. I stopped her under the floodlight hanging from the eaves. "Let me look at your eye." I reached up to cup her face in my hands, like Effy had.

"Is my mom going to notice?"

_Yes,_I thought. "I can't tell," I said. I didn't want her dashing after Katie to get revenge. "Maybe if we cleaned it up."

She pulled off her T-shirt, wet the edge of it with the faucet attached to the house, and brought it to me.

"Sit down," I said. "I can hardly see you up here."

We sat in the grass. I leaned close, tilted her face to the light, and wiped at the half dried blood. She watched me with serious eyes.

And I felt that tingle again. The same pesky tingle I'd felt when I hugged her in the living room, when I thought she was Katie. Only I knew now that she wasn't Katie. And I'd seen Emily without her shirt a million times, including hours of no shirt goodness that very afternoon. The tingle stayed.

This was only natural, I guessed. We both were still pumped full of adrenalin. We were excited about the fight and mad about Katie and Mandy, and jealous. I was leaning close to her, our lips almost touching. She still smelled like perfume, plus something sexier.

"Well?" Her voice broke again. She cleared her voice and said in her husky voice, "Well?"

"Well, it's not coming off." I gave the oozing blood one last gentle wipe and sat back on my heels. "I'm sorry about what happened."

She shrugged and kept giving me that intense, serious look. And I kept tingling. It was almost like she was sending me her adrenalin telepathically, and I could feel what she was feeling.

Which didn't make sense. Because she ought to be heartbroken about Mandy. But this felt good.

"The fireworks are starting without you." I stood up quickly and held out my hand to help her up (for show only - she was twice as strong as me). She put her shirt back on. Pity. Keeping my hand on her back, I steered her toward the muffled noise of explosions, down through the shadowy backyard of to the dock.

Boys - mostly football players my age or a year older - lit bottle rockets and held them until the fuse sparked almost down to their fingers. At the last possible second, they tossed them into the black lake. A pause. then deep under the surface, the water glowed bright green for an instant. The lake said _foop._

Emily would probably ask me to help her collect the bottle rocket sticks of the lake bottom tomorrow, another one of her dad's rules. I didn't want to do this, because I'd had an unpleasant bryozoa scare climbing up the ladder of their dock last year. But I preferred the boys shooting bottle rockets into the lake to shooting them toward my yard, which tended to give my dad a nervous breakdown. And I couldn't ask them to stop altogether. Emily got testy if she went more than a few weeks without setting something on fire.

The boys shouted greetings to Emily and shared their bottle rockets with her. She watched the sparks with delight and hardly a hint of evil. Then she handed me a bottle rocket and lit it for me with a lighter from her pocket. I finally relaxed. We forgot all about Mandy and Katie.

For a little while.


	7. Chapter 7

During the school year, Mini and Grace had said micro-miniskirts should be the official tennis team uniform because we could move better during games, and material wouldn't get bunched between our legs like it did with shorts. I'd never had the material-bunching problem myself. I figured Mini and Grace made this up so they'd have an excuse to wear micro-miniskirts to class when we had a tennis meet right after school. Thank God they'd graduated and I was (mostly) rid of them. For me, tennis and fashion didn't mix. Serena Williams I was not.

Normally I would have worn gym shorts and one of Cook's football shirts to play tennis with Panda. However, the tennis courts sat between the high school and the main road through town, which also ran past the theater, the arcade, and the bowling alley. If Katie was out with Mandy, she would drive right by. So it was the official tennis team micro-miniskirt for me.

"Is that part of your makeover to catch Katie? Wearing that skirt when you're not forced to?" Panda asked as we passed each other, changing ends of the court. We were the only idiots playing tennis on a twenty-seven degree saturday night, so we had the court to ourselves. Besides the ball bouncing and the rackets whacking, the only sounds were the cars swishing by on the road and the buzz of floodlights overhead. Still, the echo of the asphalt court made it hard for us to hear each other while we played. So we'd been carrying on a conversation like this for an hour, one sentence every two games when we traded sides.

She beat me twice, and we passed at the net again. "I'll admit it's not much," I said. "I need a new plan, also referred to as The Back Up Plan When Stage Three: Cleavage Has No Effect on Cradle Robbers. Any advice?"

I won one game, and then she beat me again. As we approached the net, she suggested, "Make her jealous? I don't know. I'm no good at being sneaky and going behind people's backs."

I dropped my racket with a clatter on the court. "Don't look now" which of course was her cue to look, "but maybe my old plan worked after all! Katie dumped Mandy already, and the pink truck is coming for me!"

The pink truck was an enormous pickup that used to belong to the marina, so old that the red paint had faded to pink and the Fitch's Marina signs had peeled off the sides. Effy had taken possession of the truck for awhile. We gave her no end of hell about it. Then, when she graduated from college, her parents gave her a new truck to take to Uni, and Katie had inherited the pink truck.

Katie, being Katie, had managed to make the pink truck seem cool. There were many rumors around school about the adventures of Katie in the pink truck with Mini or Grace. I had dreamed of my own adventures in the pink truck. Now my dreams had come true!

Except that in my dreams, I was not a loser. "Katie came to pick me up!" I groaned. "This is terrible! What do I do?"

"Act casual," Panda said in a level tone, watching the truck park just outside the high chain-link fence. "Interested, but not manic."

"How do I do that? I don't know how to do that!"

"Go hug her hello."

Just the a breeze kissed the back of my neck under my ponytail, reminding me of how hot the night was, and how heavily I'd extended myself chasing after Panda's serves. "I'm sweaty."

"If she likes you, she won't mind." She led the way through the gate and headed for Cook's side of the truck to distract him for me.

As I walked towards Katie's side, Katie opened the door and started to get out. I had to walk all the way around the big, heavy door to hug- "_Emily!"_

She looked at me, arms open wide for me because I'd been holding mine out. She dropped her arms when she saw the look on my face. "Nice to see you, too," she said grumpily.

I patted her lightly on one cheek - the cheek opposite the one with the blue bruise under her eye. The pats got harder until I was pretty much slapping her. "Why can't you be Katie? Oh, God." I knew almost before I'd gotten the words out that Emily didn't deserve that. I slid my arms around her. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it."

She didn't say anything. But she did put her arms around my waist.

I looked at her. "It's just... Why are you driving Katie's truck?"

"It's my truck."

Katie must have gotten a new truck for graduation, just like Effy. And now Emily was driving the pink truck, because - crap. "Oh, Emily, I forgot your birthday!"

"I know."

Those two words told me she'd already thought everything I was thinking. Our birthdays were three weeks apart. We'd had a few birthday parties together when we were little. How could I have forgotten her fucking birthday? "I was preoccupied with finals," I gasped, "and summer coming up and-"

"Katie. I know."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," I said sincerely. I hugged her as hard as I could, then started to pull back.

Her hands didn't leave my waist. "I'm still kind of mad," she said.

Laughing, I tightened my hold on her. I felt her put her chin on my shoulder.

On the other side of the truck, talking with Cook, Panda raised one eyebrow at me.

That's when I had an idea.

I ran my hand down Emily's side until I found her hand. "Let's talk privately."

She looked down at her hand in mine like she couldn't quite believe this was happening. I couldn't either. "Okay," she told our hands.

I called across the hood of the truck, "Emily and I will be right back, We're going to talk privately."

Panda and Cook stared at us, then each other, then us again. Finally I pulled Emily away, swinging her hand like holding hands with her wasn't the weirdest thing ever. We walked down the sidewalk, around the corner of the fence to the side of the tennis courts that faced the road. The very edge of the pool of light from the tennis courts touched us, so we could be seen from the road: very important to the plan.

I backed her against the fence. I didn't shove her or anything, but I'm sure she felt trapped against the chain links because I stood so close to her, and the determined expression on my face was so frightening.

I squeezed her hand. "I still think Katie and Mandy's little fling is fake. Katie's trying to get revenge on you, and Mandy's trying to make you jealous. She wants to heat up your romance for the summer. In two weeks, by the Crappy Festival, it'll be over with Katie, and things will be back to normal." And Katie would be free again. "But you need to up the stakes to make her interested. To make sure she comes back and never leaves you. To teach her a lesson."

Emily breathed faster. Her brown eyes widened as it dawned on her what I was going to suggest. In fact, she looked close to panic. I almost backed down. I'd be pretty embarrassed if she ran screaming away and hitchhiked with someone on the road just to escape from me. But I had to salvage my chance with Katie. I'd never gotten as close to her as I had yesterday afternoon in the lake! So I pressed ahead.

"You and I should pretend to hook up. That'll show Mandy you're not putting up with her bullshit. And it'll show Katie that I'm girlfriend material. We'll drive them mad, I tell you, mad!" I made a joke out of it in case Emily burst into uncontrollable laughter at the idea of even pretending to hook up with me. Then I could say that I'd been kidding all along. I knew Emily valued me as a friend. But I offered her a way out in case she thought I was a dog.

She swallowed, still watching me, alarmed. "You want to hook up with me. To make Mandy jealous, so I can get her back."

"Right," I said, wondering why this was so hard for her to understand. Maybe she didn't read as many teen romance books as I did.

"You think that would work? It would make her jealous to see me with another girl?"

"Sure." It was looking more and more like my dog theory was correct. "Unless you think I'm the wrong girl for the job. I'm just suggesting you do this with me because I'm trying to hook Katie, too." Did she think being with me would ruin her chances with Mandy or any other girl at our college forever, as surely she'd gone out with Godzilla?

"Okay," she said quickly.

"Okay?" I had thought it would be harder to convince her. I'd missed something. Which, I'll admit, was not all that unusual.

"Okay, we'll pretend to hook up." She still watched me. Her eyes traveled from my eyes to one of my ears, down my neck and further down to my cleavage (thank you sports bra!). She actually leaned back against the fence for better viewing of my legs beneath the micro-mini skirt. Then she met my gaze again. Like she was surveying what she had to pretend to hook up with, and it checked out, with no damage to her rep.

I should have appreciated this. I passed inspection! But her gaze made me uncomfortable enough that the pesky tingle returned. Worse, she seemed to sense that she was causing me to tingle. She made that face with her jaw dropped, trying not to smile. Then she gave up and broke into the broadest grin I'd ever seen on her face since yesterday afternoon when she beat Katie at push ups.

A memory flashed into my mind of Emily, age eight, jumping off the roof because Katie dared her to. (Broken Ankle.)

I wondered what I'd gotten myself into.

Suddenly very nervous, I rubbed my tingling hands together and looked towards the road. "Should we drive to the movie theater parking lot where more people will see us together? We could pretend to k-" I looked back at Emily at that moment, and something stopped me in the way that she watched me.

"Iss," she said, nodding.

"And they'll tell everyone. It'll get back to Katie and Mandy."

Now she was shaking her head no. "That's not going to work. We can't stage it so carefully. I'm an awful actor. Something tells me you'll never win an Oscar, either."

"Hey-"

"So we need to make it look natural. We need to act like we're into each other all the time, without checking first to see if someone is watching." Her hand was trembling in mine. "Maybe this is the first time we've realized we're into each other. And maybe this is our first kiss."

She leaned in. When her face got within a few inches of mine, I giggled. Not the fake giggle of a tomboy raised by wolves, either. A real, girly, high-pitched giggle that originated somewhere in my sinuses and made me want to slap myself. There was hope for me yet.

"See?" she whispered against my lips. "This is what we're trying to avoid. We need to act like we _want_ to do this." And she kissed me.

There were still a few inches between our bodies. So there was no embrace. Only her lips, soft, warm, on my lips.

Our fingers, interlaced.

A tingle so strong, it turned into a vibration.

A tosser driving by on the road, hollering, "Get a room, Fitch! Wooooo!"

Emily laughed a little against my lips. I thought I detected the slightest shudder, like she felt the vibration too. Then she backed up and looked at me. "Is that what you wanted?"

"Yes," I breathed. "Is that what you wanted?"

Her smile faded. "Yeah. Come on." She led me back up the sidewalk, toward Panda and Cook still talking together but never taking their eyes off us. When we got close to the truck, Emily asked me, "Will you go out with me tomorrow night?"

"I'd love to," I said, focusing only on her like I had no idea Cook was staring a hole through my head.

"I'll pick you up at seven," Emily said. "No, wait."

"That's fine," I laughed. "You can drive a hundred meters and pick me up at seven."

"I'll walk over at seven." She smiled and twisted a lock of my hair around her finger. "Seven is lucky."

Cook cleared his throat.

"That's not what I meant!" Emily roared at Cook in outrage. Emily's cheeks were bright red.

"Are we finished?" Panda asked quickly. "Naomi, didn't you lose four or five balls over the fence in the kudzu?"

Cook, Emily and I all started for the kudzu patch. But Panda caught me by the sports bra, and snapped me backward. She waited until they were out of earshot before she hissed, "Is there something you want to tell me?"

"Yes!" I said happily. "But you can't tell anybody. And I don't mean you need to keep this secret the way the tennis team kept a secret last year, by leaking it to the rugby team." I'd seen Mini and Grace work.

"I promise," Panda said, pulling a tennis ball from her pocket and bouncing it against the truck fender. She'd seen Mini and Grace work, too. On _her_ secrets. Personally, I'd never had a secret for them to work on before. I was that popular.

"Don't mention it to Cook. He might open his big mouth and tell Effy, depending on how funny he thought it was. You're the only person I'm telling. So if it gets out, I'll know you spilled it." I explained in brief the ingenious and diabolical plan. "Doesn't that sound ingenious? And diabolical?"

"It sounds hopelessly complicated. Wouldn't it be easier to hook up with Emily for real? She's adorable."

"No, she's not!" I eyed her, unsure I should have shared the diabolical plan with her after all. Granted, Emily was adorable. But I was after Katie, I didn't intend to act on Emily's adorableness. And at that moment, I realized I didn't want anyone else to act on it, either. She was part of my Adorable Special Reserve. Now that Panda was telling me that there was indeed a problem with my plan, I found that I didn't want to hear it.

She bounced the ball methodically against the truck. "You think Katie is adorable."

"Duh."

"And Emily looks like Katie."

"True that."

"So why don't you think Emily's adorable?"

I snatched the ball in midair and shook it at her. "Because she's Emily!"

Emily and Cook had found all the escaped balls. They stood in the kudzu, oblivious to snakes, and threw tennis balls as hard as they could at each other. The balls bounced off their arms and chests, and they dove after the balls into the vines again. Typical. I turned back to Panda. "You said yourself that Katie was fondue."

"No, you said that."

"You said that girls fall all over themselves to get to Katie. They don't do that for Emily."

"But wouldn't that be better? You'd have to share Katie. Emily would be yours."

I'd thought girls giggled secrets to each other because they understood each other. Panda didn't understand me at all.

Emily had made a hangman's noose out of a length of vine and was chasing Cook down the sidewalk with it. Both of them laughed like ten year olds. Emily really did look adorable when she smiled.

So maybe Panda was half right. I knew Emily had been kidding about seven being lucky. I knew she was just playing the part with me, like we'd planned, so she could get Mandy back. But part of me, a tiny part the size of a candy heart, wished she dreamed about getting lucky with me.


	8. Chapter 8

**Sorry about the long wait guys. It's been a crazy couple of days since I last posted. **

**I have discovered this wonderful story that only has one review! It's a crossover between Skins and The Hunger Games and it's really well written. Go check it out and review, it's called The Skins Games. **

Katie had the nerve to smile down at me. She shouted above the drone of the boat motor, "Naomi, when we're old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend."

I tried to speak, spluttered, and spit out a lock of my hair the wind had blown into my mouth. I was nothing if not glam. "You're old enough," I told her. "And if Mandy is old enough, I'm old enough."

She bent closer and said, "I'll pick you up at seven."

What a thrill! She'd asked me out! I was going out with Katie! Only, those were the words I'd heard. What she'd mouthed was something different. Like on one of those kung fu movies Cook loved to watch, with English words dubbed over the Chinese sound, and the characters' mouths never quite matching up.

"Bollocks!" I sat straight up in my cold, wet bed. I wiped and wiped with my palms, but I could not get all my hair out of my mouth. Then I realized what I'd said out loud. "Sorry, Mum," I told her sweet sixteen photo on my bedside table. My alarm clock blared Bon Iver, "Holocene."

Right! I vowed to move things along with Katie that day at work. I would make sure she knew I was part of the hot scene. Unfortunately, the instant I stepped into the marina office, I was presented with an obstacle to this goal in the form of a seething matriarch with pinstriped hair.

"Naomi!" she roared, spinning around in her office chair.

"Good morning, boss!" I said brightly, giving her a wave.

She narrowed her eyes at me. "It was bad enough when Emily told me yesterday that Katie stole Mandy from her. She wanted me to ground Katie, or take away her xbox."

"Ground her for how long?" If Katie was grounded, she wouldn't even be able to pick Mandy up and drive her back to her own house. She could only see her if Mandy's mom dropped her off. Talk about embarrassing. Katie didn't like to be embarrassed. Instant breakup! On the other hand, if she were grounded for the whole summer, even after she broke up with Mandy, she could never go out with me.

"I can't ground her," Jenna squealed. "I can't ground one daughter for stealing the other's girlfriend. But I've got to do something. Emily's cheekbone is blue. Katie is holding her jaw at a funny angle and won't let me look at it. The physical fights are bad enough. They can't torture each other psychologically, too!"

Of course they could. They'd been doing it for years. Obviously Katie was careful not to call Emily ADD when their mother was around. Somehow I didn't think pointing this out would help my current situation, so I nodded like I understood her plight. "Do I have gas?"

She folded her arms. "And this morning Emily told me she's going out tonight. With you."

"Don't say I didn't warn you," I sang, sweeping my hand down my body in the _all this can be yours_ gesture.

"You were after Katie," she spat.

"Who, me?" Yes, I actually said, _Who me? _I was beginning to see Emily's point about me never winning an Oscar. "I was after Emily."

"You were after Katie. You watched her moonily all day Friday. You took an hour and a half for lunch, waiting for her to show up."

I raised my chin haughtily. "You people are slave drivers. Can't I have a break to watch What Not to Wear?"

"Besides," she said more calmly, examining me too closely for comfort, "if you and Emily really were about to start going out, Emily wouldn't have complained to me just yesterday about Katie stealing her girlfriend. She'd be happy to have you, and she'd forget all about her."

Good point. Where was Emily to take some of this heat? I looked around futilely for her. Then I told part of the truth. "It's the principle of the thing. Emily's also mad Katie broke her remote controlled Hummer that she got for Christmas six years ago."

She went limp with exasperation. "Emily broke that! Emily said Katie broke it on purpose, Katie said Emily broke it, and I believed Katie."

"Exactly."

She stared me down, waiting for me to crack, while I tilted my head this was and that way and fluttered my eyelashes at her. Finally she nodded at the door and said, "You're in the warehouse. With Katie."

A torture worse than death, ho ho. A second chance to move things along. Katie and I helped the full time workers take boats out of storage. Mostly we found the boats that needed to be brought down, cleaned the seats, and topped off the fluids in the engines. As we finished each boat, Effy and Cook delivered it across the lake. Emily had gas. More than throwing me with Katie for spite, I think Jenna was trying to keep Katie and Emily away from each other.

I did my best with Katie, but it wasn't good enough. She treated em exactly like she always had, except for two days before in the boat. She would do things that were so, so sweet, like get me a soda from the office when she got one for herself. But then she spoke to an old lady customer in the same loving tone she'd use on me. Also her mother.

Maybe she didn't know that Emily and I were going out. I couldn't imagine that Jenna had shared this tidbit with her if she thought it would add fuel to the fire. So Katie didn't understand she was supposed to realize I was girlfriend material and feel jealous. Skilled though I was in the womanly arts of manipulation and talking smack, I couldn't quite figure out a way to pass this info along to her without coming out and telling her, which would blow my cover. So I was super sweet right back to her and traipsed around the warehouse in my singlet and generally acted like her and I were just friends. Ha!

Late in the afternoon we went wake boarding. Yesterday we'd skipped team calisthenics for the first time ever, and we had no taste for them today either. Cook didn't announce it was time for calisthenics, and neither did Effy. Katie and Emily just glared at each other as they threw life vests at each other to pitch into the boat.

I think we all were a bit on edge by the time we launched. But Katie spotted first and Emily sat way up in the bow, so we began to relax. After all, Katie and Emily weren't likely to get into it on the boat. Effy and Cook were there to pull them off each other. Cook was stronger than any of the girls.

As for me, I wanted so badly to sit across the aisle from Katie. She might scoot over and share my seat with me, like two days before. But no, she would never do this and mess up her "relationship" with Mandy - not while it was having the desired effect on Emily.

Subtlety and patience were not a couple of my strong points. Perhaps you have figured this out. However, I managed to keep my eyes on the prize, which meant bypassing Katie and hunkering down against the wind in the bow with Emily. Problem was, Katie's seat faced backward so she could spot for Cook wake boarding. She didn't even see the knee-weakening look Emily gave me as I sat down.

But Effy in the driver's seat could see us, and Katie might be so gracious as to turn around once in awhile. I wondered what Emily would want to do with me. Whether she would try to touch me, and where. Maybe she was thinking the same thing I was thinking: it was a bit early for PDA in our faux couplehood. If we suddenly fell in love after seventeen years of being friends, it would be obvious we were faking to show Katie we didn't care about her and the treacherous Mandy.

For whatever reason, Emily didn't touch me. She was content to watch me, darkly. I had no idea why she was looking at me this way. Clearly we were not thinking the same thing after all.

Then I had another problem. Emily had told me two days before that I'd screwed my chances with Katie by taking her place in the wake boarding show. Maybe I should face plant an air raley so Katie wouldn't think I was rubbing it in. But you know what? I was still so thrilled with my great runs two days in a row, I wasn't willing to throw it for a girl. Even a girl this important. Maybe this was something I could work on as I matured.

Katie had another bad run. Emily did too but at least she enjoyed it. I had another run so fantastic, I decided I'd work on a S-bend the next day. Ideally this would involve landing the S-bend, unlike some adrenalin junkies I knew.

And Katie didn't seem to mind I did well and she didn't. She was her usual pleasant self, a bit too distant for my taste, same old, same old. She must be really basking in the fact that she'd gotten Emily's goat. I mean, girlfriend. That was okay. I would get Katie in the end.

I was feeling very hopeful about the whole situation when we docked at the marina. Maybe it was the sun again, or the lingering glow from my good run. But when Emily helped me out of the boat and we did the secret handshake, I didn't even care it was a complete waste of handshake because Katie had already gone into the warehouse and didn't see it happen. Doing the handshake made me feel like somebody valued me enough to do a secret handshake with me.

"By the way," I said during the high five, "What was up with the look you kept giving me in the boat?"

"What look?" Emily asked, blushing. She knew what I meant.

"This look." I showed it to her.

She squinted at me. "I'm not a doctor, but I'd either say indigestion or a stroke."

We laughed, touched elbows, and parted ways on the wharf. I sauntered to my house, taking big sniffs of the hot evening air scented with cut grass and flowers, not minding too much that I had to spend a few minutes blowing a gnat out of my nose. I wish Katie had asked me out like she was supposed to. But if I had to go on a fake date to get her, there was no one I'd rather go on a fake date with than Emily. I might even enjoy it, as friends.

After supper with Dad and Cook, and a luxe beauty routine that included teasing my mascara-coated eyelashes apart with the comb attachment to Cook's electric razor, I was ready. An hour early. I peered out my bedroom window at Emily's house and wondered what she was doing right now. Getting ready herself? Taking a shower?

Even thought the picture of her in the shower was all in my head, I took a step back from the window at the force of the picture, and the realism. I must be picturing Katie in the shower, because the girl in the shower wasn't wearing the skull and crossbones.

Emily wore the skull and crossbones while wake boarding and swimming. She must wear it in the shower too. Or did she? In all the times over the years we'd worked together at the marina, when she'd bent down and the pendant had swung from the leather string, I'd never noticed a dirty patch in the shape of a skull and crossbones on her neck. Okay, I couldn't stand another hour of torturing myself this way.

I said bye to my dad and waded in my high heels down my yard to the dock. Then I untied the canoe and set off across the lake. Crossing the lake in a canoe, a sailboat, or anything without a motor could be harrowing. The lake was about half a kilometer wide at this point, and a canoe crossing the traffic pattern was likely to get T-boned by a speed boat driven by someone who didn't understand boating laws and was drunk to boot. But the busiest part of the day was over, and I paddled fast.

On the other side, I tied up to the Jones' dock. Funny that the kids weren't swimming. They'd probably been swimming all day and had brained each other several times with plastic shovels and nearly drowned once, and Kieran was about damned tired of it and made them get out of the water. I was all too familiar with this scenario.

I dropped down on their side of the fence, walked over, and sat on the edge of the sandbox. "Whatsamatter?" I asked the kidlet. "You've never seen such a vision of loveliness?"

"There's a gate, you know," Kieran said.

"I didn't notice."

"It's on the other side of the house, off the driveway, where people usually put gates."

"I got in, didn't I? God, you always want me to do things your way." This was sort of unfair. Kieran had been pretty hands-off as babysitters went. Like I had anybody to compare him to. "Well this time I've definitely done something that isn't covered in the child care manual. Go ahead, ask me what happened at the party. Ask me what happened the night after the party. Ask me where I'm going now, dressed to kill."

"Something else is going on with those girls," he said after I explained the situation to him.

"Like what?"

"I'm not sure. It's been years since I gave Emily or Katie or Effy or Cook the evil eye. You're the only one who comes to visit... Jeremiah, we do not eat the sand." He scooped up the boy and took him inside. The boy didn't protest. The children had been drugged or lobotomized.

I turned to the other boy. "Don't you ever protest?"

He shook his head.

"Hold strikes? Write letters of complaint? He always told us we had permission to do anything if we could write a convincing argument for it. We tried."

He intoned in a cute little zombie voice, "We do not eat the sand."

Kieran came back out and deposited Jeremiah in the sandbox again. He examined some nearby dried leaves hungrily. "I guarantee you something else is going on there," Kieran repeated. "Yours isn't the only plot."

I laughed until I choked. The children studied me with serious eyes. They were adapting to the Montessori method a lot better than Cook and I had.

"I always loved Emily," Kieran said.

I sniffled. "You did?" Kieran wasn't too free with the professions of love.

"But Emily had room to grow. Sounds like she still does."

Feeling strangely defensive of Emily all of a sudden, I said, "Everybody has room to grow."

"And I don't want you to be on her field." He gave me a stern look.

"What am I, a crop of rutabagas?"

He glanced at the kids and said through his teeth to me, "Do you understand?"

"Not really. Are you forbidding me to see Emily?" This was actually sort of romantic, though ridiculous. _I forbid you to see the girl next door!_

"Ever since your mum died," he whispered, "your dad has been terrified for you kids. But he's gone out of his way not to be overprotective do that you don't live life afraid. And those were the instructions he gave me as your caregiver." He reached over and patted my knee. "No one's going to forbid you anything, Naomi. Just... watch out around those girls."


	9. Chapter 9

**So we've finally got to the date. I've decided to split this up into two parts so I'll post the second half tomorrow night hopefully. Don't hold me to it though, life might get in the way. But if it's not up tomorrow it'll definitely be up the day after. **

**Again, I'd like to say, go check out The Skins Games fic. Incredibly written.**

**And now that I'm done talking up that fic it's time to get to mine.**

Emily sat on the end of my dock with her shoes beside her and her bare feet swinging in the bryozoa-infested waters. Just kidding, my dock had been sanitized for my my protection by a minnow net with a very long handle.

I skimmed the canoe against the dock and stopped myself with an oar. She stood up dripping, caught the rope I threw her, and wound it around the dock cleat. "Date or what?" she asked.

Grabbing my shoes from the bottom of the canoe, I confirmed, "Date. Ew. It's so weird to think about. Help me out, lovah."

She put out a hand to help me onto the dock. She did it in such a gentlemanly fashion, with no tickling or pinching or even a secret handshake, that I couldn't help but yank her arm to startle her. Then she put her weight on me to keep from falling, and we both came within a few millimeters of flipping the canoe over and landing in the lake.

We both managed to save at the last second. She helped me out of the canoe as if nothing had happened, except her face was bright red, and she wore that _don't make me laugh_ look. "Your dad said you went to see Kieran."

"Yeah. I told him about the plan, and he thinks you're only going along with it because you want to get lucky with me." We shared an uncomfy titter at this ridiculous idea as she slid her feet into her shoes, but something made me press her about this. "Did you get lucky with Mandy?"

She stared down at me, disapproving. She turned the disapproving stare in the general direction of the Jones' dock across the lake.

"You did," I said with a sigh. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath.

"N-," she started. "W- Mmph." she put both her hands into her hair. This showed me how strong and toned the arms were on this tanned, beautiful girl. "I didn't, but you don't know that, okay? I have two older sisters. As far as they're concerned, I've been doing the entire cheerleading squad since I was fourteen."

She hadn't. So why was I picturing the tanned arms straining as she braced herself above... who?

"Your dad's been thinking the same thing," Emily said.

"About your arms?" I chuckled.

Slowly and oh so painfully she put her arms down. "I would like some gum," she said. "Would you like some gum?"

"I would love some gum," I croaked.

She reached into the back pockets of her jeans and drew out each of the following items in turn, placing them in my hands: her wallet, a lighter, a plastic box of fishhooks, and a four inch long pocket knife. Finally she produced a pack of gum so old, the company had switched to a new logo since it was made. Fine. Anything I could stuff into my mouth.

"I meant," she said, jaw working hard on the petrified square, "your dad thinks I want to get lucky with you too. At least, that was his second reaction when I rang the doorbell and told him I was there to pick you up for our date. His first reaction was to threaten to have me arrested."

"Oh, pshaw." I swallowed a mouthful of artificial flavoring. Mmmmm, igneous. "He threatens to have me arrested. It's a term of endearment." I walked down the dock so Emily would follow me. When I glanced back, she was still standing at the end of the dock. I threw over my shoulder, "I'll visit you in prison."

She jogged to catch up with me, and held my arm to balance me as I slipped my heels on. I knew better than to wear heels on the dock. I'd seen too many girls wear them at the Fitch's parties. Heels got caught between planks and arrested forward motion.

"Why didn't you tell your dad that we're hooking up?" Emily asked. "I told my mum we're hooking up." She sounded almost hurt, like she thought I was embarrassed of her.

"Would you come off it? You shouldn't have told your mum. She gave me the third degree this morning, like she knows something's up between you and Katie. You tried to get her to ground her? How am I supposed to go out with her if Jenna grounds her?"

Emily shrugged and said with a straight face, "If you really loved her, it wouldn't matter what you did when you went out, as long as you two were together." She pressed her lips together.

"You are so full of it. Anyway, I told Dad you were giving me a lift to town to buy an eyelash comb tonight, and we might hang out for awhile. I figured he'd stage an intervention if I told him the whole truth. And if I told him you and I were hooking up for real, he'd give me the fourth degree about it, and you, and sex, and... oh."

Emily nodded. "Whereas if you didn't tell him, he'd give me the fifth degree."

"I guess I didn't think it through. It didn't seem worth the trouble, since we'll only be together a couple of weeks." Truth was, I'd focused on how our diabolical plan would help me get Katie. With an emphasis on Katie. Not that Emily's relationship with my dad didn't matter, because they did have to live next door to each other for several more years, but come on. What were a few dates between friends?

We walked up the hill to Emily's driveway. I opened the passenger door of the pink truck and climbed inside. And I do mean climbed, because when I stood on the ground, the seat was even with my head. Emily sat in the driver's seat, weirdly. She'd driven Cook and me home from tennis the night before, but I was used to sitting in the backseat with Emily while someone older drove. I wasn't used to seeing her as a driver herself.

Katie's new truck had already left the driveway. She had to drive all the way across town to pick up Mandy. No worries. We'd see them at the movies. Our biggest problem would be deciding whether to sit in the back row with the other couples who planned to make out, or further down where Katie and Mandy could see us. Then maybe there would be the additional problem of the making out. But I was getting ahead of myself. We could solve that problem when we came to it, and we hadn't even reached the movie theater yet. We were taking a detour at the dirt track, probably to show some of Emily's friends the new (to her) pink truck. And the hot prize of a girl inside! Yeah, probably not.

Instead of parking in the dirt track lot, she drove around to the mud field. It was just a huge pit of mud that the owners of the dirt track lovingly sculpted into valleys and bumps, and watered later. Build it and they would come. People loved to splash across the mud pit in their pick up trucks. They didn't do this with their girlfriends, though. They wouldn't put up with this.

And yet here we were, perched on the lip of the pit. I ventured to ask, "Is this our date?"

"In all it's glory," With one arm, Emily made a sweeping motion across the mud field before us.

"Great. We're trying to make Katie and Mandy jealous, besides which it's my first date in real life, and you're taking me mud riding." I'd been with the girls and Mr. Fitch to the dirt track countless times to watch races. I'd always thought my first date would be with Katie. Emily wasn't too far off. But I'd never imagined my first date would be with Katie's stand-in at the dirt track. "You're bringing sexy back."

She stuck out her bottom lip. "Where did you want to go?"

"Didn't Katie and Mandy go to the movies?"

"Yeah, but I'll bet she made Katie take her to the new Disney cartoon. That's her punishment for stealing her from me." She cracked her knuckles.

"Emily, I don't care if it's _Mickey and Minnie Bust a Move._ We need to be there."

"We want to make them jealous," she agreed, "but we can't follow them around. We don't want to admit we're trying to make them jealous. And that's exactly what we'll be doing if we set foot in _Mickey and Minnie Bust a Move._"

I started to protest. But as I thought about it, I remembered every time I watched a DVD with the girls, Emily had left the room every thirty minutes, asking Effy to call her back in for the juicy parts. And we were always telling Emily to be quiet. We couldn't hear the movie over her iPod, or her drum set, or the roar of the blender as she made milkshakes in the kitchen. I asked, "You can't sit through a whole movie, can you?"

She frowned, which made cute little lines appear between her brows. She fished the lighter out of her pocket and flicked it, studying the flame.

Either she couldn't sit through a whole movie, or it hurt her too much to be around Mandy while she was with Katie. This wouldn't help us make them jealous. But it was only the second night after the freaking shock of seeing Katie with Mandy together for the first time. Emily's heart must be breaking ever time we talked about Katie and Mandy, yet she'd come with me this far. I could be more understanding and give her a few days for the wound to scab over.

"We don't have to go to the movie," I sighed, "but we need to go somewhere girls will see us. There's no one here but boys. It'll never get back to Katie and Mandy that we were together. Boys don't gossip."

"Ha! You don't know them as well as you think."

This was a disturbing prospect.

She stuffed her lighter back in her pocket. "Here's an idea. Call me crazy, but what if we actually enjoyed hooking up?"

"Woah, Nelly," I said. "You scare me, thinking out of the box."

"What if we made hooking up productive?"

"That's what I'm talking about. Producing envy, with or without big fat teardrops."

"Forget about that, Naomi. It'll come to us without trying so hard." She took the box of fishhooks out of her pocket and rattled it. "You're turning 18 in less than two weeks."

That was a low blow. "You don't have to rub it in that I forgot your birthday," I protested. "You remember mine because yours is first."

"And didn't your dad stop taking you for driving lessons after you ran his Beamer into the woodpile?"

"Only because he told me to back to the left, and I thought I did. I would have done fine if he'd pointed instead of telling me the direction. Again, you don't have to rub it-"

"I'll teach you to drive."

I blinked. She was a daredevil. "Around town?"

"No, right here. It's safer."

I pondered the mud field. "I might wreck the pink truck."

"Who could tell?"

"I might hit somebody else."

"If they're here, mud riding, they'd probably get off on it."

As if in agreement, Freddie McClair chose this moment to start honking his horn in time to his stereo blasting music.

"Oh, what the hell," I said, spitting my petrified gum out the window. It had turned more of a metamorphic flavor anyway. I scooted into the driver's seat as Emily crawled over me. Nose close to her shirt, I caught a whiff of her perfume.

And then, too soon, she was on her side of the truck and I was on mine. "Is it in first gear?" she asked. "Are your feet on the brake and the clutch? Look both ways and make sure no traffic is coming before proceeding carefully into the mud hole."

I screamed like a girl as the edge of the pit fell away under us. Then I bit my scream off short as we bounced over a little hill that sent us flying. Now I was giggling. Emily grinned and fastened her seatbelt.

"Put the truck in first gear again," she said in an amazing imitation of the calming announcer voice from the films we watched in drivers ed. "Press harder on the gas to scale the side of the mud hole. As you reach the top and circle back around for another turn, don't forget to signal."

Later, waiting in line for our seventh time through, she told me, "You drive fine."

"Really?" I squealed.

"Yeah. Of course, I haven't told you to turn left or right."

"Right," I said, disappointed. I thought I'd been driving fine, too. But I'd done well only because she hadn't asked me to do anything hard, like tell left from right. And let's not even think about starboard and port.

"When you're driving by yourself, it won't matter," she reasoned. "You've lived in this town forever. You know how to get around. Your dad won't be sitting in the passenger seat, telling you to turn left or right. The only time anyone will do that is when you take your driving test."

"That's also the only time a person taking her first road test will be banned from driving in the UK for life." I edged the pink truck forward as a truck dropped into the mud field in front of us.

"I have ADD," she said. "I'm the master of cheating on tests. Just put your hands on the wheel like this." She placed her hands on the dashboard with her first fingers up and her thumbs in, pointing toward each other. "L is for left."

"Won't the chick giving me the test notice I've got my fingers in an L on the steering wheel?"

"Hold your hands like that while she's examining your car," she said. "By the time you start driving, she won't think anything about it. She'll think you have arthritis and it's none of her business."

I looked over at her. "You're a lot sneakier than I thought."

She smiled.

I said, "Kieran hasn't forgiven you for exploding his homemade cheese."

Her laughter rang out at just the moment I plunged the truck into the pit. She'd given me the confidence of Dale Earnhardt Jr. on holiday. I veered off the very beaten path and into uncharted mud puddles. I kicked up splashed so high, Emily rolled up her window and asked me to roll up mine to save what was left of the ancient interior. We bounced from corner to corner and were bouncing our way back again when the truck dipped lower than I expected, sending a wave of muddy water across the hood and up the windshield. I pressed the gas and heard a ripping sound.

I turned to her in horror. "I broke your truck."

"We're just stuck. It happens." She unfastened her seatbelt. "Switch back."

I started to crawl over her. She'd crawled over me last time, and I figured this time she'd slide under. But she'd started to crawl over, too. We met in the middle, laughed, and both moved to slide under at the same time.

"Do you want to be on top or on bottom?" she asked.

"Either way," I heard myself saying. I had to remind myself that this was Emily, not Katie. This was the baby of the Fitch family, who had always been the smallest, up until two days ago. At least in my mind.

She picked me up and, before I could wiggle, removed me to the passenger side. "There." She slid into the drivers seat and pressed the gas, harder than I'd pressed it, with a longer and louder ripping noise. She opened the door and stepped out, sinking much farther than she would have on solid ground. "They'll call a tractor from the racetrack to pull us out, but it might take a while. Let's wait by the concession stand. You'll ruin your shoes, though. Here, get on my back."

She stood outside the open driver's side door. Her back was waiting. I hadn't been on someone's back since... well... a free for all fight with the girls on boys' backs at Cathy Kirk's pool party in middle school. If I'd been included, obviously there hadn't been enough girls to go around. And in middle school, the girls and the boys were about equal in height and weight, so I'd worried I would crush the boy I rode on.

Very much so with Emily. My shoes were dainty things you shoved your toes into with nothing to hold them on. I kicked them off and held them in one hand. I slid across the seat and onto her strong, solid back, feeling like a feather. A snowflake! A dainty snowflake surrounded by an acre of mud.

She nudged the door closed with her hip. I looked down. Her feet had disappeared. "What about your shoes?" I asked. "Jenna will kill you."

"They're Katie's. I'll put them in her closet just like this."

I felt a momentary pang for Katie. Then almost laughed out loud, picturing the look on her face. They were her shoes, and she would have the right to be mad. But if anything could ever make me dislike Katie, it was how much she cared about her clothes. I cared about my own clothes only through great effort.

We made it to the top and the prize was a tiny airstream trailer blowing smoke out an exhaust fan. The air smelled like fried food. "Are you hungry?" she asked.

"No, but that never stopped me before."

"Me too." She stepped up to the window and looked in. "What do you have?"

The clerk/cook/janitor looked up from a talk show on TV. "Crisps, homemade doughnuts."

With me on her back, Emily couldn't turn her head around enough to look at me, but she turned it enough to let me know I should choose from this array of delicacies.

"Strangely," I said, "I have a taste for crisps."

Emily reached into her pocket to pay. Putting me down on the bench beside the concession stand would have been miles easier. I was beginning to understand that she liked having me on her back. Holding my shoes in one hand, I grabbed the crisps with the other, and she carried a soda.

She walked us to the bench, put the soda down, then put me down. I was still holding the crisps and my shoes. I tossed my shoes on the ground (oh well, so much for dazzling rhinestones) and picked up the soda so she could sit down, then handed it to her. It was like one of those problems on a test at college. If Katie hooks up with everyone in school on Wednesday and Mandy on Friday, and Emily hooks up with Mandy on Thursday and Naomi on Sunday, on what day does the nuclear war commence? One of those problems Emily would just draw an X through because she thought she would never encounter anything like it in the real world.

She crossed one leg over the other casually, as if she weren't coated with mud up to her knees. Then she took a sip of the soda, handed it to me, and pulled out a crisp. I took a tentative sip of the soda. Not that I thought she had germs, or really bad germs anyway, but we'd never shared a drink before. We'd shared popcorn, of course, while we watched DVDs with the others. Once the scoop from my ice cream cone had plopped into the lake, and she'd shared her ice cream with me. This was probably kind of gross. I shouldn't read too much into sharing a soda now, though. It was something people did when they went out.

"Mmph!" she hummed with her mouth full of food. Swallowing, she grabbed my bare foot and pulled it into her lap. "You painted your little toe nails."

I opened my mouth to explain proudly that the toenails in question represented hours of meticulous work. Well, maybe forty-five minutes while watching movies. I'd put the polish on and taken it off three times because it tended toward gloopy. Who knew beauty regimens could be so complex?

But when I looked up, my mouth just stayed open. She was staring at me with those big brown eyes. A chill hit me from nowhere. It made the hair on my arms stand up. It raced down my body to my toes, which she was stroking with one rough thumb. And so the chill ran back up my body again.

I took a slow, shaky breath through my wide open, ridiculously gaping mouth. Then I realized what the problem was. Her resemblance to Katie was eerie sometimes. I managed to say, "You're giving me the look again. Don't look at me like that."

Stubbornly she gave me the look for ten more seconds, so there. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the look. I really enjoyed what it did to my skin. She was a superhero with Massage-O-Vision. I enjoyed it too much for comfort. She was just going to turn her Massage-O-Vision on Mandy when she got her back, so the pleasant pricklies I felt were pricklies on loan. She'd be horrified to know she was giving them to me. Besides, I wasn't going to sit there and let her give me the look when I'd asked her not to give me the look.

Just as I was about to either pinch her or find the strength to look away, she let my toes go and turned away herself, gazing out over the splashing trucks. The mud sparkled in the artificial light. At first glance it might have seemed about as romantic as watching cement being poured, or a building being demolished by a wrecking ball. Nothing said romance like the scent of burning rubber. But to me, it started to seem very romantic. I almost wished Mini and Grace could see me now. Well, not really, because mud had splashed up on my calves. I scratched at a spot with my fingernails, and it smeared.

She asked, "Why does it have to be Katie?"


	10. Chapter 10

**I decided, fuck it! Just give them the update now. So here it is guys, The big date part dos. Hope you enjoy.**

I snapped my head up and tried to gauge what she'd meant by this. I couldn't tell, because she wouldn't meet my gaze. Which was probably a good thing. I could feel myself flushing as my heart pounded.

I as attracted to Emily. Not as much as I was attracted to Katie, of course. That would never happen. But Emily had been so sweet and fun, teaching me to drive. Tangling with me as we switched places in the truck didn't hurt either. Or carrying me on her back. I really enjoyed her carrying me on her back.

Did she mean, _Why does it have to be Katie instead of me? _And if she did...

Good God, what was the matter with me? Emily didn't like me that way. She just hated Katie. She wanted to know why I was so stuck on Katie, of all people.

And I didn't like Emily that way, either. Not really. Flirting with her was fun, but that's all it was, and I was getting carried away. I needed to remember I was on a mission. I would tell her the whole truth about the mission. I owed her that much, since she'd agreed to help me by faking a relationship with me.

I munched a crisp and thought about Katie sashaying her way through the school lunchroom last spring, Grace on one arm, Mini on the other. Everyone turned to watch as she passed. People called out to her from the tables. All she needed was the paparazzi behind her. Also Grace or Mini needed a very small dog that got sick when it ate too much protein. I said simply, "Katie lights up the room."

Emily still wouldn't look at me. "I can see why you'd want to watch her, listen to her. Not why you'd want to get together with her. She lights up the room so bright that you would just be sitting there blinking, blinded."

"I've always wanted to be with her," I said, "Yeah, I can see the drawbacks, but I don't think you or anyone could argue me out of it. I need to find out for myself, because I've wanted to do this for so long."

"Always," Emily muttered, tossing up a bit of crisp and catching it in her mouth.

"Almost always. Actually, I can remember the very day it started." The mud field in front of us dissolved into a sun-splashed view of the lake through shady branches. The roar of the monster trucks faded, replaced by birds chirping, and my mother's voice. "It was before Mum died. We were all really little. But I remember it so clearly. Your whole family was at my house for a cookout in the summer. I was with Mum and Jenna up on the deck. I'd wanted to play with you guys, but Mum wouldn't let me.

"Your mum said I was such a lovely little girl, so ladylike and polite. That's what pricked my ears up, of course: the praise. But I kept playing like I wasn't listening in. Then your mum said I didn't always have to stay home. I was welcome to come over to your house to play whenever Cook came over. She called him James. Whatever. Now I was really paying attention, and holding my breath to see what Mum would say. All I'd dreamed about my whole little life was playing with you guys."

"Why?"

I snapped out of my daydream. I'd almost forgotten Emily was sitting there.

She put one hand on my knee, watching me, and didn't even turn to look when Freddie purposely spun his tires, coating one side of the pink truck in mud. "Why did you want to play with us?" Emily asked. "At that age, we were basically squirting each other in the face with water guns."

"Compare this to sitting in my room by myself, dressing and undressing the Barbie."

"Oh." She nodded.

"Anyway, of course I was disappointed, as always. My mum said your mum was so nice to offer, but she didn't want me playing with Cook's friends very often. That we needed our own friends."

Those frown lines appeared between her brows. She moved the plate behind her on the bench, slid over until her leg touched my leg, and put her hand on my knee again.

Strange how her touch made it easier for me to talk. I went on, "Just as Mum was telling Jenna no, Katie came up the stairs crying. You and the others had dared her to stick bread between her toes and put her foot in the water. A fish mouthed her and she freaked out."

"Er-" Emily started.

I waved her off, because this was the most important detail. "My mum took her chin in her hand, turned her face toward me, and said 'Just look at those eyes. She's going to be a heartbreaker.'"I found myself smiling at the memory. But when I turned to Emily and saw the look on her face, I stopped smiling.

"That sounds like a bad thing," she grumbled.

"People mean it as a good thing," I said, suddenly not as sure of this as I'd been for the past twelve years. But I couldn't really expect her to understand. Talking about Katie around Emily was like throwing Evian on a fire. "And then Mum said, 'Naomi, just wait until you're eighteen' She was stuck on the eighteenth birthday. We made a scrapbook with pictures of all my baby events, and spaces for when I would turn six and eight and ten and twelve, and a supermondo sequined space for when I turned eighteen. She wanted me to have what she'd had, a great eighteenth birthday, exactly what any teenage girl would want. Her parents gave her a special grownup ring, and she wore a wonderful dress that's hanging in my closet."

We'd moved away from talking about Katie. Predictably, Emily took a deeper breath and relaxed against the bench. "Are you going to wear the dress on your birthday?"

"Are you kidding? It was so long ago. Uncool."

"I'll bet it's pretty. You could wear it wake boarding on your birthday, during the Crappie Festival show." She was back to her old self.

I chuckled. "Unfortunately, you and I are the only two people in the world who would think that was funny."

"What does that have to do with Katie?"

I squirmed a little under the gaze of her eyes. I felt her disapproval even though I hadn't told her what she should disapprove of yet. But she was helping me with Katie, and I'd committed to telling her the whole story. "Mum died not long after that. I took it as a free ticket to Disneyworld. Yay, Mum wasn't around to stop me! I got to play with you guys! Only I always felt guilty about being the least bit happy she was gone, even when this was the one good thing about it. And I felt guilty I didn't tell Dad or Kieran that Mum wouldn't have wanted me over at your house. It went against her wishes for me. I promised myself I'd clean up by the time I was eighteen. And if I could finally convince Katie to ask me out by my eighteenth birthday, I would know I'd turned out okay after all.

Emily nodded. "Because you think your mother picked Katie out for you."

"No, not exactly-"

"Like an arranged marriage," Emily interrupted. "That's very 2011."

"No, not like that. Mum knew what was best for me, and if she were still around, she would have taught me how to get it. She's not around, so I have to figure out for myself. I'm transforming myself from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. There's much preening to be done. It's actually pretty time consuming. I have to run my beak down every single feather to distribute the oil evenly and make myself waterproof."

"Naomi-"

"And I've almost perfected my Mini and Grace imitation. At least, I though I had, until the mud riding started."

"You think going out with Katie will turn you into Mini McGuiness?"

"Sort of. If I hooked up with Katie, everyone would treat me differently. Everyone loves Katie. If Katie chose me, they'd think they'd always overlooked something special in me. Then maybe I really could become that girl. I know you hate Katie, but you understand why everyone else loves her, right?"

I took Emily's stony silence as a yes.

"Girlfriend/Boyfriend love is totally different from sisterly love. But the effect would be the same, Like standing in her aura. Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like if Katie loved and valued you as a person?"

"I'd know Armageddon was coming. I'd brace myself for the locusts."

"I'm serious. If she just looked at you the right way, that alone could probably carry you through for a month. But if she loved you..."

Emily shifted on the bench. I thought she was standing up to stalk away, disgusted. Instead, she placed her arm around my waist. Lightly her finger stroked valentines on my side, which gave me the shivers all over again.

"Every word out of Katie's mouth is meant to hurt me," she said. "And it's always been like that. Effy says Katie changed after I was born. She went from the adorable, cute newborn that existed only a few minutes earlier into something much worse, nastier almost. When I was a baby and Mum wasn't looking, Katie threw blocks at my crib."

I almost laughed. The idea was so ridiculous. It was even more ridiculous for Emily to be angry about something like that when she was eighteen years old.

I managed not to laugh. I believed her. I knew Katie.

"But that's you," I said. "I'm sorry she treats you that way, but I'm the one who's going to get together with her, and she doesn't treat me that way."

"She will," Emily said. "If you ever let her get close to you, she will." The valentines she traced on my arm had turned to shapes with lots of sharp points, like in comic books when the superhero punches the villain.

The tractor arrived then to pull the pink truck out of the mud. Emily took her hands off me, which I regretted more than I should have. She leaned forward to watch and make sure the driver didn't attach the chain to the lose side of the front bumper.

"Why does it have to be Mandy?" I asked.

"It just does," she said without taking her eyes off the truck.

"You might feel better if you talked about it."

"I doubt it."

"What do you like so much about her?"

When she turned to me, she seemed alarmed, as she had with the tennis court the night before. With wide eyes, she searched my eyes for something - which I probably would have given her, if I'd known what she was looking for. I asked, "What are you looking for?"

She shook her head and turned back to the mud pit. "I like her because she's so pretty," she said in her bullshit voice.

"That's no fair. I gave you a straight answer about Katie."

The tractor started forward. The chain to the pink truck pulled tighter and tighter and broke. One end of it flew over the tractor, barely missing the driver.

"She's cute," Emily said. "She has a nice ass. I don't know."

Now I understood. Talking about her hurt her too much. It was easier for her to pretend the ADD had kicked in.

After two more chains and a rope, the tractor liberated the pink truck, and Emily bought the driver a doughnut. Emily and I drove through the mud field for another hour and a half, taking turns. Mostly we managed to forget about Katie and Mandy.

Then we drove into town and hit all the teenage haunts: the bowling alley parking lot and the movie theater parking lot. In theory this is exactly what I wanted. I was being seen out with Emily, in Emily's truck. In practice, Emily had purposely besmirched Katie's pink truck with mud. It was like she wanted to be seen around town in it for that reason.

We rolled home two minutes before my curfew. I'd figured she'd park the truck at her house, and I'd walk home. I was thrilled that she drove over to my driveway to drop me off. Katie wasn't home yet to see us, but maybe someone in the Fitch's house would watch across the yard and mention it to Katie later.

And then, as I was turning to Emily to thank her for teaching me to drive and allowing me to foam at the mouth about my mum, she bailed out the driver's side door. She walked around the front of the truck. I think she would have opened my door, a gentleman on a date, if I hadn't opened it first. It was too strange. I jumped to the ground, forgetting I was wearing my heels again. She caught me just before I pitched over onto the gravel.

"I'll - walk - you - to - the - door," she said slowly and clearly, like talking to someone who didn't speak English. Or didn't go out on dates much, or, ever. She took my hand. We walked toward the lights slanting through the shadows of pine trunks. I shivered.

We climbed the steps to the porch. Dad hadn't turned on the overhead light there, thank God. Emily stood close to me in the darkness, over me, expecting something. I expected something, too. I couldn't have stood the disappointment if we'd done all we'd done that day, hugging and giving each other smoldering looks and all, without something to show for it at the end, even if we were just friends. But my head felt too heavy to raise my chin.

"Hey." She put her hand under my chin and gently raised it for me. "If one of us were in love with the other, if it were uneven in some way, that would be bad." She gave me a long look I couldn't really see. The shadows on the porch were too deep. Her eyes only glittered a little in the starlight.

I tried to give the look right back to her. "But we're not," I said, and what was with that damned squeakiness in my voice _or not?_ I cleared my throat.

"But we're not," she agreed. "We have nothing to worry about. We can do whatever we feel like."

"Right," I said, and meant it.

The kiss was simple. She leaned in and pressed her lips to mine. We stood still except for the pressure on my lips. But inside, every cell in my body turned a back flip to blind.

"Good night, Naomi," she whispered. She bounced back to the pink truck, cranked the engine, drive one hundred meters to her own driveway, waved to me, and went inside her house.

I stood on my porch and stared at her house for a long time, telling myself that I did not like Emily that way because I liked Katie and Emily liked Mandy and I did not like Emily. It was just that Emily was very smart. and was second only to Katie at making confusing things sound simple and death-defying stunts seem like a good idea.


	11. Chapter 11

Monday night, Dad insisted that Emily came over for dinner. Emily, my dad, Cook and I ate and joked together like we normally would out in the yard, except that it wasn't normal. It was weird. Emily sat in my mum's chair at the table. We might as well have been staring at a showy centerpiece made of silk flowers and hand grenades.

Tuesday night was much more comfy. Katie was over at Mandy's and Effy was out with her girlfriend, so Emily and I had the Fitch's living room to ourselves to watch a DVD. At least, that's what we did for about thirty minutes. Then we played CD's in her room, experimented with her drum set, and made milkshakes in the kitchen. Without anyone else around to show off for, we could just be ourselves. Friends.

Wednesday night we went mud riding. I wore my terrible shoes this time. I knew this wouldn't sound very romantic when it got back to Mini or Grace. I also knew that, just like the other nights, I would stand on my porch with Emily and got the simplest, most shiver-inducing kiss. And then it would be over. The next morning, we'd go back to being friends.

Thursday night we scored. So to speak. We'd planned to go to the arcade and see who could kick the other's ass on the snowmobile racing game, but Emily called me just before it was time to pick me up. She sounded tinny, like her hand was cupped over her mouth and the receiver. "Code green. Code green. Mandy and Katie watching DVD here tonight. Over."

The wound Mandy had inflicted on her must have healed enough that she could stand being around her and Katie. Or she must miss her so much that she was willing to take a more active role in making her jealous. Either way, this was our big chance!

Slamming down the phone, I rushed upstairs to exchange my Skechers for Steve Madden pumps and my tanktop for something that said elegance, sophistication, Express. This was how I was supposed to talk about clothes, right? Naming the brands as if I cared? Another coat of mascara and a run-through with the comb attachment to Cook's razor and I was ready!

Katie's truck was parked in the driveway behind the pink truck. She'd already brought Mandy over. I swallowed and tried to slow down my breathing as I pressed the doorbell with one shaking finger.

Almost immediately, I heard Emily bouncing inside. She jerked the heavy door open. "What are you doing? You don't have to ring the doorbell, dork."

Dumbass! She'd called me a dork loudly enough for the McClairs to hear three houses over. Talk about romance.

I was about to whisper acidly that she wasn't doing a very good job of falling head over heels in love. Then I noticed she was wearing her black T-shirt printed in white with a life size rib cage. Emily looked best in black. The color reflected darkly in the hollows under her cheekbones, not to mention the bruise under her eye, and made her strange eyes stand out that much more. The skull and crossbones glimmered at her neck.

She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to say what I'd opened my mouth to say.

I was speechless. So I grabbed her arm and spun her around at the same time. She was surprised. I managed to pin her arms behind her back for about two seconds before she shook loose and grabbed me. She kicked the door closed and hiked into the living room.

Passing, she took a few steps toward Katie and Mandy watching TV on the sofa. They sat close together in the dark room. I wouldn't have been able to tell whose limbs were whose, except Mandy's were darker. There was a loveseat where Emily and I could have settled. Then Emily thought better of it - too close for comfort - and hiked across the room.

"Hello Katie. Good evening, Mandy," I said cordially.

Mandy gave us a half-hearted pipsqueak greeting. Katie shouted at us, "Can you keep it the fuck down?"

Hmph! Clearly she was in a jealous rage. Emily and I exchanged a knowing look as she slid me onto the desk in the corner. Holding my wrists immobile, she fished in a drawer and brought out a long object.

I squinted at it in the dark. "Not the stapler!" I cried.

She grinned, tossed the stapler beside me, and rummaged in the drawer again.

"Please," I gasped, "not the Liquid Paper!"

"Fucking shut the fuck up!" Katie shouted.

Emily and I widened our eyes at each other like we were offended and hurt. I shook my wrists out of her grasp and reached behind me for a red Sharpie out of the pencil cup. Smoothing my hand across her chest (shiver), I made a red mark across the bottom right rib printed on her T-shirt, the rib I knew she'd broken. Or was it my other right? "What ribs have you broken?"

She looked down at her shirt. "This one," she said, pointing.

I made a red mark across that rib. "What else?"

"Mm." She stretched her shirt out at the bottom so she could see it better, and pointed to the opposite side. "These two." She watched as I made neat red marks across those ribs. Her chin was close to my cheek.

"Both of you act crazy," Katie said smoothly, "like you're off your medication. Or like you're going to a shrink."

I didn't look at Emily. I didn't think I looked at Katie, either. But I had an impression later of Katie's face glowing white and then blue in the light of the TV, and Mandy in the shadows beside her. I thought the medication comment was meant for Emily. I knew the shrink comment was meant for me.

I capped the marker and stuck it back in the pencil cup. "I'll see you later," I whispered, sliding around Emily and hopping down from the desk. I had to get across the room and outside without being further humiliated, which meant I must not fall down in my high heels. Or cry. I even closed the front door behind me without making any noise.

And then Emily burst through it and slammed it behind her, shaking the house. "Naomi!"

"Shhh," I said with my fingers to my lips, backing off the porch and into the wet grass. I didn't want to shout about what Katie had said. It was bad enough when we were quiet about it.

Emily collected herself as I watched, taking a deep breath through her nose, with her eyes closed. Then she opened her eyes and said, "The five minute date does nothing to make them jealous." She formed her first finger and thumb into a circle. "Zero."

I swallowed. "I can't."

She stepped closer to me. "Katie has a way of finding that one thing that will make you feel so good about yourself, or so bad about yourself. That's why you love her. That's why I hate her. You knew this when you went fishing."

I was too discombobulated to make a joke about my lures. I just wanted to get away from their house. "I've had enough of girls for today, I think."

She frowned. "Are you sure?" She rubbed my arm. My hair stood on end.

Shivering in the warm night, I put my arm down by my side, where she couldn't reach it. "Too much of a good thing. It's strange, but even doughnuts can get tiresome."

"I'll walk you home, then."

"No," I said, "I'm sorry. I'm just done."

She watched me carefully for a moment, lowering her head to look into my eyes. "Okay. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Bye."

She walked back into the house and closed the door softly.

I stared at the door knocker, tree frogs screaming all around me. I had done the wrong thing. I wanted to be in the house with her. And Katie.

Katie had said something like that to me only once before, just a good natured joke as we passed each other in the hall at school. I'd started to cry. The office had called my dad (again). Dad and Cook and I had had a Big Talk about it that night, wherein I told my dad that my business was not his to tell Katie's parents about, and wherein Cook promised to have a discussion with Katie about keeping her mouth shut. Apparently he had, because Katie never said a word about to me about it again. And if she told the whole school, they were very discreet and didn't let on to me that they knew. Which would have been out of character for them, because they were tossers.

That first time happened not long after I went to the shrink, so Katie probably was just experimenting to see what I'd do. This time, she must have mentioned it because she was trying to hurt me. And if she'd tried to hurt me, she was in love with me and jealous of Emily. I knew this because when she wasn't in love with me and jealous of Emily, she ignored me and was quite pleasant to me.

Therefore, the plan must be working! Hurrah! So I should go back in there, flirt with Emily, and press the issue.

As I stood there, considering whether to ring the doorbell or just walk on inside like I owned the place, or like they'd installed a dog door, I heard Emily holler, "Thanks, Katie."

"No problem," Katie said more quietly, because she was too courteous to yell in Mandy's ear.

I felt a flash of panic. They weren't being sarcastic. Emily was genuinely thanking Katie for getting her out of spending an evening with me. This was called a negative self-concept. Having a negative self-concept made me think people were making fun of me, which I seemed to miss completely.

Then footsteps pounded up the stairs inside. Emily's bedroom light flicked on. She put her hands on the windowsill and pressed her forehead to the glass, looking for me, but she couldn't see out because of the glare.

Emily wouldn't double cross me.

Would she?

Friday I had gas. This was fine with me. I spent most of the morning by myself on the dock, soaking up rays and feeling mentally diseased.

I didn't think I could stand a lunch hour in the office, eating Jenna's chicken salad sandwich, on edge, expecting Katie to sneak in or Emily to burst in or both. I told Jenna I was treating myself to a nice lunch out.

"Oh," she said, nodding. "Something happened between 'you and Emily'?" She moved her fingers in quotation marks.

Yeah, I didn't have the energy to argue with her this time. That was Emily's problem. I walked over to my family's dock and launched the canoe.

The open water was choppy with wind and wakes from passing speedboats. I didn't get T-boned. It was a little early for anyone to be drunk.

The wind blew me off course. I reached the far bank and needed to backtrack along the shore to the Jones' house. Here in the shallows, protected by overhanging trees, the water was clear and calm. Miniature whirlpools stirred around my oar. I dragged my hand in the warm water, and minnows nibbled my fingers.

I docked at the Jones' and ran up to the house. It was such a relief to feel the grass on my bare feet! Every toe had a blister from a different pair of high heeled sandals. I slid open the glass door and stepped into the den.

Kieran and the kids looked up. They were sitting on the floor around the coffee table. Kieran didn't sit on furniture if there was a floor available. He had stuck lengths of uncooked spaghetti into balls of Play-Doh. The kidlets were busy sliding Froot Loops onto the spaghetti, sorting by color. I couldn't believe they'd fallen for that old trick. Kieran could convince children anything was a game, for about five minutes. Obviously some children were more gullible than others.

I walked into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. No surprises there. The meat loaf was made with tofu. I filled a bowl with Froot Loops, poured soy milk over them, and joined the powwow on the floor.

Between bites I asked, "What did you mean when you said mine wasn't the only plot?"

Without looking up from the magazine on the coffee table, Kieran said, "I told you. I don't know."

"Like, Katie dared Emily to hook up with me because I'm so oafish and dog-looking?"

"You are not dog-looking," Kieran said sternly. "Besides, a plot like that would involve a high level of organization. They would have to think it through carefully. None of you do that. Except James, of course, who thinks things through so carefully that he can't take action. Like his father."

My spoon stopped in my mouth at the mention of my dad, who'd been the farthest person from my mind. I swallowed and shouted, "Then what the hell kind of plot are you talking about?"

Kieran didn't even react when I cursed in front of his charges. He reasoned that making a big deal out of curse words drew attention to them and caused children to use them more. So he ignored them. I'm not sure this ploy worked, but then, he'd had an uphill battle with Cook and me. We lived next door to Mr. Vader, who could have written a dictionary of filth. She asked, calm as ever, "Have you thought Emily might really like you?"

The hair on my arms stood up, just as if Emily were sitting behind me with her hand on my shoulder.

"No, I haven't." That would be seven kinds of awful, if Emily had agreed to pretend to get together with me because she really wanted to get together with me. My ploy to get Katie would be ruined. I might finally land Katie, like in my dreams. But knowing I'd broken Emily's heart would be a downer and a distraction. Like making out in the movie theater, knowing the pink truck in the parking lot was on fire. My mother wanted me to be with Katie, but didn't she want me to be happy?

Kieran turned the page. "Open your eyes. And watch out for those girls."


	12. Chapter 12

**Thanks for all the reviews and people adding the story to their alerts. I really appreciate it! So I'm getting further and further on with this story and I imagine there'll be about twenty to twenty one chapters. It's up to you guys and what you ask for once I've published the twentieth chapter. Anyways, keep reviewing and keep reading. You guys keep me writing. **

Wake boarding that afternoon, I watched the twins until my eyeballs hurt from the sun glinting off the water. I could have sworn there was nothing to watch out for. Katie was a little warmer to me than usual - the way she always acted after she'd insulted me, like some friendliness here could make up for a lack of friendliness elsewhere.

Emily was very warm to me. While Katie drove, Cook wake boarded, and Effy spotted, Emily sat in my lap in the bow. I set my chin on her shoulder and rubbed my hands up and down her thighs. The best part of this, for the purpose of making Katie's blood boil, was that Emily accepted this without comment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to act like my girlfriend.

The worst part of this, for the purpose of watching out for those girls, was that if my eyelids had been duct-taped open to my eyebrows, I still wouldn't have been able to tell whether Emily liked me, or pretended to like me, or liked me but pretending she was only pretending.

The five of us pitched the wake boards and life vests from the boat back into the warehouse. The Friday night party would start soon, so Katie, Effy and Cook headed for the houses. I ought to have been right behind them. I needed plenty of time to shower and primp and change clothes twenty times like girls were supposed to do before parties.

But I took Emily's hand and held her back from the others. I whispered what had been bugging me all day. "Kieran thinks you have a plot, other than the plot with me to make Katie and Mandy jealous."

Her eyes flew wide open, and the rest of her seemed to shrink back a bit. Then she stood up straighter, and her brow went down. "Kieran? I haven't spoken to Kieran in years. Plus he's creepy."

"Only because he's always right," I said. "And last night, something you said to Katie... Do you have a plot against me? Are you double-crossing me? She dared you to go out with the dog next door, and if you did, she'd give you your cute little girlfriend back?"

She snorted, then seemed to have a hard time huffing out laughter, almost as if he were relieved. She hugged me tightly, head in my chest, and breathed into my tits, "You're not a dog. You're beautiful."

Right. I knew what she meant. Beautiful on the inside. I had saved a baby sparrow or two in my time. I was not someone she would want to hook up with, but a beautiful person. Hooray.

"Don't ever let Katie convince you you're not." She glanced in the direction Katie had gone. "Let's go for a sailboat ride."

I loved sailing. But if we went now, we'd be late for the party. "Can't we do it tomorrow?"

"This will be an investment in your future. It'll be worth it."

I waited while Emily leaned into the office to tell Rob what we were doing, and I followed her back into the sailboat that was very old and very small. The hull was a light fiberglass platform with a hole for the metal mast. Emily and I toted the hull, mast, and sail to the edge of the wharf, threw them in, and tossed down a couple of life vests. Emily stepped carefully into the hull, sat down, and steadied it against the concrete wall for me as I stepped on and sat down. The sitting down was very important. The boat was so small that it would tip and throw us off if we shifted our weight the slightest bit too far, like trying to stand on a basketball. Together we lifted the mast upright, slid it into the hole in the center of the hull, and unfurled the red sail.

"Do you want to drive?" she asked.

"You can drive," I said.

I scooted around the mast to the tiny bow. Emily slid to the back, taking the rope attached to the sail in one hand and the handle of the rudder in the other. She pulled the sail taught, the wind filled it - and the boat tipped over, dumping us both into the lake.

I came up quickly. The life vests were floating away on the current, but the more important thing was to make sure the mast didn't fall out of the hole and sink. We'd have a hard time retrieving it from the bottom of the lake, even here near the wharf where it was relatively shallow.

Emily had the same idea. Without a word to each other, we met under the boat. Her hair flowed weirdly around her and her brown eyes were dark in the water as she motioned for me to turn the hull right side up while she dove after the slowly sinking mast.

I came up into the sunshine doe a breath and flipped the hull. Emily surfaced beside me, groaning with the weight of tugging the sail full of water. Together we managed to bundle it around the mast so less water was trapped in it. We pulled the sail and mast out of the water, slipped the mast into the hole in the hull, and peeled the sail into position. Water rained everywhere.

"This is romantic," I said. "You have a knack. What the hell kind of date is this?"

She laughed. "You'll see."

After we retrieved the life vests, I sat on the bow like in _Titanic._ But without any of that _I'm queen of the world_ bullshit, holding my arms out. Come on, it was a sailboat on a lake. Emily steered us back and forth across the water. The red sail billowed above is in the strong breeze, so we wouldn't get T-boned by drunks. Unless of course they headed straight for us like in a bullfight.

Sometimes Emily jerked the boat around so fast that I slipped off the bow and into the water. These were not accidents, I thought - the gleam in her eyes was too gleamy. She turned the boat only when we were very close to shore, though, where it was safe. I wasn't too concerned about getting ground to bits by a passing boat motor in the open water.

We made it to the bridge and floated under. The sound of cars zooming on the highway overhead echoed in a sucking sound underneath, with a _clack clack, clack clack_ as they crossed from one section of the bridge to another. I called over the noise, "How much farther are we going?" I looked back at the Fitch's house, tiny across the water. "The party will start soon."

"Someone there you want to see?"

I thought she sounded bitter. But when I turned around to glance at her, she was the usual Emily, quiet and intense, one finger tapping the boat with barely contained energy.

"Yes, duh. Isn't there someone at the party you want to see? We can't make them jealous if we're not there."

"Actually, we can." She nodded to a pile. "Catch that and stop us."

I hugged the pile and brought the sailboat alongside it. Emily opened the compartment in the hull and pulled a can of spray paint out of the pool of water inside. She popped off the cap, sprayed a little paint into the air as a test, and stuffed the can into the waistband of her shorts. "Wait here, woman," she said, then grinned. She climbed the pile, finding tenuous footholds between the concrete blocks.

"Uh," I said. She was already at the top of the pile. "Emily?" She reached to the metal outside edge of the bridge and, using only the strength of her arms, hoisted herself up until she stood on the ledge. All I could see of her was her heels peeking over the edge.

I wasn't worried about her falling. Effy had fallen off before, and it had only stung. I was worried about the black clouds creeping up on the sun on the far side of the bridge, and the wind picking up. A cold gust caught the sail. The boom swung around suddenly and would have decapitated me if I hadn't ducked. Not really, but I would have had a blue bruise across my neck, and how sexy is that? I crawled to Emily's spot in the back of the boat, untied the rope, and lowered the sail. "Hey, Emily."

The clouds blotted out the sun. Far across the lake, the shoreline looked misty with a wall of rain. Lightning forked from the black clouds to the dark green lake.

"Emily, lightning!" I called. My voice was drowned by thunder.

The paint can dropped into the lake. I fished it out and put it back into the compartment. Lightning flashed, closer.

Her feet appeared, her legs, her shorts. With the strength of a hundred pushups a day, she lowered herself slowly until she hung by her arms from the edge of the bridge. I expected her to drop into the water, because she was like that. She would be electrocuted, just to put our names on the bridge. Which might sound romantic, except something could only sound so romantic when it involved spray paint.

Thankfully, she swung her legs onto the pile and descended the way she'd gone. She stepped carefully onto the boat just as the lightning cracked again, so loud and bright we both jumped, and thunder boomed directly overhead. I scooted toward the bow to make room for her.

She raised the sail, saying, "I'm sorry."

"It's okay!" I shouted over the noise of the rain and the deafening echo of rain under the bridge. "Not your fault."

"It wasn't supposed to rain tonight."

"Storms pop up."

Pushing the sail into the wind just long enough to give the boat momentum, and pointing the sail out of the wind again before we blew over, he steered us toward shore. Two piles spanning the width of the bridge stood between us and the bank. Twice, we both put our hands on the piles to pull the boat out into the rain and around to the other side. I bent my head under the cold deluge. Big, hard raindrops beat the back of my neck.

We made it to shore and climbed part of the way up the slanted concrete embankment under the bridge. Emily brought one of the ropes from the boat with her. She curled it around her ankle so the howling wind didn't blow the boat home without us. I curled it around my ankle, too, for good measure.

We both stared forward at the swaying sailboat, red sail puddled on the hull, and the pile beyond it. Rain cascaded over both sides of the massive bridge in sheets. My bikini bottoms didn't provide much padding between the rough concrete and my ass. The rain had chilled me. I moved imperceptibly (I hoped) toward Emily to bask in her heat.

The noise and echo of the rain filled my ears, but Emily's voice beside me sounded even louder. "Why'd you go to the shrink?"

I looked down. My palm was bleeding. I must have scraped it on the pile.

"Was it because of your mum?"

I wiped my palm on my other hand. Great, now I had blood on both my hands. Helpful. I wiped them on the back of my bikini bottoms. Blood stains came out in cold water, and we had plenty of that.

I could feel Emily watching me.

"It wasn't right after Mum died," I said. "Actually it wasn't until sixth grade, when Kieran left because Cook and I had gotten too old to need keeping during the day while Dad was at work. Frankly, I think he was glad to go. Katie calling him names probably got tiresome."

"Katie gets tiresome in general." Emily didn't mean to change the subject - she just couldn't help making this comment. She tapped my knee with her knee, prodding me to go on.

"It wasn't like I did anything so crazy," I said. "Though that's probably what crazy people always say, right? I just didn't want to sit in class anymore. The teachers were fine and the kids were fine. I just couldn't picture myself sitting in a desk in a straight line of desks for another seven hours."

"Ha!" Emily said. "You had ADD."

"It must have been catching. So when Dad dropped me off at school in the morning, I started checking in at homeroom, then disappearing into the basement, or into the attic. I could stand over the ductwork at one corner of the attic and hear everything the principal said in her office. I could crawl above the auditorium, where the janitor went to change the spotlight bulbs, and listen to rehearsals of the school play. I was seeing this whole side of the school that other people didn't know existed."

Lightning flashed, thunder clapped. The rain pouring off the bridge into the the lake sounded like static. That's what sitting in class back then had been like. Where there had been a channel before, now there was only static. I couldn't tune in, and even if I could, there was nothing to see.

"Eventually school called my dad to say I'd missed so much school, I was going to fail the sixth grade. My dad threatened a lawsuit because it was the school's fault they'd lost me. The upshot of it was that I went to a shrink for a while, and took some pills-"

"Pills," Emily uttered in utter disgust, like I would say bryzoa or gelatin salad. I hated gelatin salad. It was so ambiguous. What was it made of?

"These pills weren't bad," I said. "They helped. I only took them for awhile. I went back to class and everything was fine. Really I think it never would have happened if you'd been in my class, if I'd had someone to talk to. The other kids didn't even notice I was gone."

We listened to the rain for a few moments. She said, "Lately, I've been thinking about going back on my pills."

I thought she was saying this to make me feel better about spilling my secret. I hoped she was just saying this. Emily on her pills was no fun. She was serious and level headed and cautious. Like everybody else. But if that's what she wanted, I should support her.

"Katie makes me..." Emily said slowly, balling her hands into fists," ... so ... mad." She flexed both hands with her fingers splayed. Like the anger was so great, she needed to shoot it out of her fingertips before it caused her to burst into flames.

"I know," I said. "Me too." This wasn't exactly true. Katie didn't make me mad at her. She made me mad at myself.

A cool blast of wind made the chill bumps stand up higher on my arms. The sailboat rope tugged at my foot. I crossed my arms in front of me, covered as much skin as possible with my hands, and contracted into a ball.

"Hey. Come here." Emily slid her arm around my waist. Assuming we were both 37 degrees, I didn't understand how she could be so much warmer than me. Her skin felt like she'd been standing in front of a fire. I slid my arm around her shoulders and relaxed into her toasty goodness. I leaned my head against her head. Her fingers moved a little on my waist. I thought I felt her heartbeat speed up, but I wasn't sure.

Eventually the rain dwindled like someone turned down the volume of the static on TV. The thunder moved far away, and what was left of the sunset flung pink and orange on the scattering clouds. I hardly shivered as we edged down the embankment to the boat. Now the problem was finding any wind at all to get us home in the calm after the storm. Sitting on the hull, we both ducked as she wound the boom all the way around the mast and finally caught a little breeze.

We emerged from darkness under the bridge, into the golden light, and looked back. Partly because rain had battered the wet paint, and partly due to Emily's atrocious handwriting, the bridge didn't say EMILY LOVES NAOMI. I cocked my head to one side, then blurred my eyes, neither of which helped. I read out loud, "ENOLY LOVES NADMI."

"They'll know what I meant." She was so proud. "Let Katie top that."

And she did.


	13. Chapter 13

**I'm really glad you guys are liking this story. Please keep reviewing, it keeps me writing!**

The party had started. It was hard to see in twilight, and with the mist rising off the water around us after the rain. But the gray twilight and gray mist made colors pop. Bright T-shirts and Slinky Cleavage Revealing Tops dotted the Fitch's lawn and concentrated at the end of the dock. The faint bass beat of the music across the water was punctuated by the occasional _foop_ of a bottle rocket.

Just as Emily had been waiting for me on my dock last Sunday when I canoed to see Kieran, Mr. Fitch was waiting for us on the marina dock. It was awkward generally for someone to wait for you on the dock like this, because you realized they were waiting for you and watching you when you were still ten minutes from reaching them. With Emily, I'd felt compelled to wave and make faces at her the whole return trip. With Mr. Fitch, it was worse. He stood on the dock with his feet planted and his arms folded.

"I'm in trouble," Emily said.

"I know." I was sitting across from Emily on the hull. I didn't sit on the bow, and I didn't want to. It seemed inappropriate and frivolous now that Emily was about to get grounded.

We sailed past Mr. Fitch on the dock. He followed us up the stairs and around the wharf. He helped us pull the mast and sail and then the hull out of the water and carry them, dripping, into the warehouse, all in complete silence. Mr. Fitch's jaw was set. In the twilight, Emily's expression had already settled into darkness.

Finally Mr. Fitch closed the door of the warehouse, locked it, and turned to face Emily with his hands on his hips.

"It wasn't supposed to rain tonight," Emily said quickly.

Mr. Fitch nodded. "The storm popped up."

Emily backed off a millimeter. "Well. Since you were paying attention, thanks for coming to our rescue."

"I knew you were okay. I watched you." Mr. Fitch took a pair of folding binoculars out of his pocket.

"That's creepy," Emily said.

"You know what's creepy?" Mr. Fitch asked. "Two kids who are supposedly dating spray paint their names on the bridge like they're in love. They get caught under a bridge during an electrical storm. And they don't fool around. They just sit there."

I'd planned to stay quiet and let Emily handle her dad. I didn't want to get her in more trouble. But this was too much. "Emily's right," I piped up. "That's creep-"

"Can you believe this?" Emily interrupted me. She didn't care I was trying to back her up. She wasn't even listening. She turned to me and said, "You're a witness to this. It's probably the only time this has happened in the history of the UK. I'm in trouble for _not_ fucking you."

Mr. Fitch took his hands of his hips and pointed at Emily's chest. "I won't have you talking like that in front of Naomi. Or in front of me, for that matter." Which was ludicrous, because the girls had learned all their best figures of speech from Mr. Fitch. So had I.

"Why not?" Emily's voice rose. "That's what you're talking about, right? And now you don't want to talk about it? Maybe you're sorry you brought it up. Maybe you see now that's it's none of your business."

"It's my business when it's part of this stupid game between you and Katie."

"Which one?" I asked.

As if I hadn't spoken, Mr. Fitch said to Emily, "Your mother was right. You and Naomi aren't really dating. You're trying to make Mandy jealous and get her away from Katie."

Katie made Emily angry. I could only imagine what it was doing to Emily to find out her dad bought Katie's act. Emily was going to explode at her dad. She would be grounded. We wouldn't get to make Katie and Mandy jealous tonight. I put my arm around her and told Mr. Fitch, "Maybe she's more of a gentleman than you think."

Emily gave me a look of utter disbelief. Despite how serious the situation was, I almost laughed.

She didn't explode, but her chest did expand, until I lost my hold around her. She turned back to Mr. Fitch, held out her fingers, and touched the first one. "Katie." She touched her second finger and said, "Stole." She tapped her third finger vigorously. "My." She touched her pinky. "Girlfriend."

Mr. Fitch hmphed and half turned away, finished with us. "It's obvious Katie has something good going on, as usual, and you're trying to ruin it. Katie bought Mandy a wakeboard. She gave it to her at dinner, in front of your mother and Effy and me. You don't mess with something special like that." He stalked down the pier, toward the party.

Emily and I looked at each other. Katie had been saving the money she earned at the marina to buy a Byerly for herself. She'd bragged about it every day in the boat, like all she needed was this new trick wakeboard and she'd be numero uno again. We were talking hundreds of dollars.

She'd spent that money on Mandy instead?

Emily jogged down the pier and stepped in front of Mr. Fitch, blocking his way. "What about bindings?"

"Bindings too," Mr. Fitch said, "They're on order."

It didn't make sense for Mr. Fitch to be proud of Katie buying her new girlfriend a wake board instead of buying one for herself. It was a frivolous purchase made way too soon in their relationship. Right? What Emily and I knew, and what Mr. Fitch knew too but clearly wasn't admitting to himself, was that this was the first time Katie had ever done something selfless.

Or so it seemed. But she'd given it to her in front of her mom and dad, like she'd wanted to impress them more than her. The ew factor was off the charts. Parents were bad enough. You didn't go out of your way to involve them.

Emily was thinking the same thing. "Her birthday isn't until March. Why'd she make this big presentation at the dinner table?"

"Because she values her," Mr. Fitch said haughtily, "and she wanted to show us how much she values her."

"Couldn't she value her out in the Volvo?" Emily hollered. "Jesus!"

Mr. Fitch pushed past Emily and resumed his walk up the pier. Partygoers in his yard stepped out of his way. I watched him carve a path through the crowd until he disappeared inside the house. I couldn't hear over the music, but I could tell from the way people near the house jerked their heads in that direction that Mr. Fitch slammed the door.

Emily pinched her own arm thoughtfully. She reached over and pinched my arm.

"Ow!" I squeaked.

She took me by the shoulders and shook me gently. "She gave her a wakeboard."

"I know."

"In front of my parents. Because she values her." She imitated her dad's tone, heavy with gravity.

"You could have valued her," I pointed out. "You could have given her something that meant a lot to you." I nodded toward her neck.

Her eyes flew wide open. She gripped the skull and crossbones pendant protectively. "You gave this to me."

We pinned each other with a long look, and I wished for the millionth time in the past week that I could read her mind. She was upset all over again about losing Mandy. She was outraged that her parents believed Katie over her about Mandy. But the pendant was more important to her than Mandy? Because I'd given it to her?

THe boys with the bottle rockets had noticed us and shouted to us. They were shooting bottle rockets near us in the water. Sooner or later they would set a boat on fire. Yet I couldn't tear my gaze away from Emily's eyes. She must have seen something in my eyes, too.

"I'd better go change," I said slowly. "For the party."

"Right," Emily said, still holding my gaze.

"So." I laughed nervously. Dork. "I'll meet you back here in a while. Beauty takes patience. Ha ha ha ha."

She shook her head. "We should go to the party like this"

"Like this? My hair is full of lake."

"You look great in a bikini. As you know."

I was glad the dusk hid my blushing face. Or maybe it made my blushing face stand out like it made other colors pop, because I was that fortunate. "What do you mean _as I know? _I don't _know._"

"If you didn't know, you wouldn't be wearing a bikini to get Katie's attention."

"Yeah. Fat lot of good it's done me."

"You wouldn't be flaunting it."

"Flaunting it! Are you sure? I have no idea what that would look like."

"Come flaunt it up at the house."

I wasn't sure why this irked me. She'd told me I looked good. She'd told me I would look good to Katie. That is what we wanted. Anyway, I couldn't stand out here and flaunt it for anyone in my bikini. I knew the night was hot and steamy, but the rain had done me in. I was freezing.

"Cold again?" she asked me, stepping closer.

I shivered some more. My stupid body had a mind of its own. "Toasty."

"Hold on." She took the extra keys to the warehouse from the ledge above the door and stepped inside. She came back out with a zip up sweatshirt printed with the name of our football team on the front and a number on the back. She held it up like an old man holding up an old lady's coat for her. I slipped my arms into the sleeves. Then she turned me around towards her. She pulled the hood up over my hair. Put the hood back down. Kissed me on the tip of my nose.

_Foop!_ A bottle rocket exploded in the water just below us, illuminating a blob of bryozoa clinging to the wharf.

Emily took my hand, whispering, "We've got them right where we want them. Trust me."

She led me through the crowd in the yard, up the deck stairs, into her shadowy living room pulsing with music. Katie was surrounded by a bunch of people listening with open mouths to her puffed up story of how she gave Mandy a wake board. Even Mini and Grace exclaimed like they were happy for Mandy instead of grumbling internally that Mandy was another in a long line and Katie was just showing off. Two feet away, Mandy was surrounded by hoydens screeching about how lucky she was to have a girlfriend like Katie.

From inside the dark room, the lights on the deck must have made Emily and me glow like a TV show. As we stepped through the door, everyone turned to stare at us.

I backed the slightest bit toward Emily. She squeezed my hand.

Then the floodgates opened. The girls who'd surrounded Mandy flocked to me to squeal about Emily spray painting our names on the bridge. The boys with bottle rockets on the dock had seen it before the sun set and had spread the news around the party. The people who'd surrounded Katie moved to Emily and ribbed her about misspelling our names.

Emily played this perfectly. She laughed it all off like she didn't care she was getting more attention than her stewing sister. She rubbed my shoulder and asked, "Aren't you hungry? We haven't eaten." She peered over my shoulder at the spread Jenna had laid out on the bar. "Party food isn't going to cover it."

"Starved." I followed her around the bar that separated the living room from the kitchen. There were partial walls on either side, so the kitchen was a little more quiet. At least we could raise our voices over the beat of the music without making ourselves hoarse.

She opened the refrigerator door. "What'd they have for dinner? Chicken Casserole." She wrinkled her nose. "I don't want the casserole of love, do you?"

"Definitely not."

"Hey," Panda called across the bar.

"Hey," I responded, and looked over Emily's shoulder into the fridge again. Then I realized what I was supposed to be doing. I walked around the bar, screamed, "Pandaaaa!" and hugged her while jumping up and down. This was a lot easier in bare feet than it had been in heels, let me tell you.

"Hi there," she said, wrestling me off her. "You're insane. I'm so late. My mom made me play in a stupid tennis tourney today. Where is everybody?" She peered into the kitchen.

"Don't I count?" Emily asked from inside the fridge.

"That's Emily, right?" Panda whispered.

"Right," I said. "Katie is holding court by the palm tree in the living room. The art geeks are outside in the grass."

"The football team is on the dock, shooting bottle rockets into the lake," Emily offered. I knew where her heart was.

"The trumpet line from the band is on the deck," I said. "Who were you looking for?"

"You!" Panda said. She handed em a small present wrapped in Valentine's paper.

"Hey, thanks!" I said, ripping it open. "What's it for?" My birthday was still a week and a day away, and I didn't think anyone from school knew when it was. "How sweet!" I held up the eyelash comb, twirled it between my fingers, and slipped it into the pocket of Emily's sweat shirt. I hoped I remembered to take it out again at the end of the night.

"It's a hostess gift," Panda said. "You know, when you come to a party, you bring a present for the hostess."

"But I'm not the hostess. This isn't my house." I wondered whether she'd tripped over some tennis balls, hit her head, and forgotten she'd gone with me to my house last week.

"You're the hostess because you're the girlfriend of one of the hosts," Panda said.

Without meaning to, I glanced at Emily. She'd closed the fridge door and leaned against it, watching me.

"Or pretending to be," Panda added.

Emily's brown eyes widened at me. Something told me - and I am sure this was not feminine instincts, because we have established I did not have any of those - but something told me my explanation of how Panda knew about the plot might go over better if I heated Emily up. I slid my arms around her waist and pressed close to her, backing her against the fridge. Her eyes grew even wider.

I gave her a coy half-smile that probably ended up looking like the first signs of a seizure. "You know how I am. I can't make a move without telling someone else about it."

"Yeah, _girls_ are like that," Emily told me, "but you're not."

Panda cleared her throat.

Emily cleared her throat.

I cleared my throat, removed my hands from Emily's waist, and brushed imaginary dust off her bare shoulders, setting straight any oafish damage I might have done. From now on, whenever I got the idea that maybe she liked me a little, I would remember that she did not like me a little. I didn't need to read her mind.

"Hey," Panda squealed. She must have seen Mini or Grace or a super cute boy - but no, it was only Cook. They disappeared into the living room with their heads close together, shouting over the music. If she got rid of my approaching brother for me because she thought I needed some alone time with Emily to talk out our problems, she was wrong. Again. I started to follow her.

"Dinner's ready," Emily said behind me.

I looked towards the table in the kitchen. She'd set two of the places with knives, forks spoons, and napkins. She'd placed a sandwich on each plate and sprinkled parsley flakes in a circle around it. Bam! She'd stacked the crisps artfully in dessert bowls. She'd even lit one of her leftover birthday candles between our places. It all would have been really cute if she'd meant it. I was still pretty cute as a farce to make Mandy jealous, I supposed, but I wasn't in the mood.

"Let me help you," she said, pulling out a chair for me, as if I were a girl or something. Vivid imagination, this girl. I sat, and she scooted me up to the table.

She took a bottle of soda from the fridge and held it in front of me, like she was a wine steward. I nodded that the year was okay. She unscrewed the cap and handed it to me. I sniffed it like a wine cork, nodded my approval again, and handed it back to her. She poured soda into wine glasses for both of us, then sat down with me.

She took a gargantuan bite of her sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and looked at me. "What's wrong?"

_Oh, nothing. _That's what a girl would say, and she'd sulk for the rest of the night. But I wasn't capable of keeping my mouth shut. "I'm confused."

"It's not really wine," she said. "It's Diet Coke. And if anyone ever serves you brown wine with a foamy head, send it back."

"Thank you, Dr. Science." I took a dainty bite of my sandwich. Emily was a real gourmet. Peanut butter and strawberry jam. "I'm confused because I thought you said I was flaunting, and now I'm not even a girl? I thought you said I was a good flaunter."

"You are a good flaunter." She swirled the Diet Coke in her glass and sniffed the bouquet.

"Then why am I not a girl?"

"You - Shit, I knew that's what you were mad about. I didn't mean it that way." She leaned her head to one side and popped her neck. "You know as well as I do that you don't act like other girls."

"I'm working on it, though." I was working so hard! I felt like crying into my salt and vinegar crisps, which was a step in the right direction.

"But it's good you don't act like other girls. Of course, I don't have any say in it, because you're not after me. You're after Katie."

"You wouldn't have any say in it anyway, you patriarchal freak." I chomped a crisp and said with my mouth full, "Thanks for cooking dinner. I love it when the little missus makes a house a home."

She glared at me. "Eat up. We have work to do."

"What kind of work? Devious kissing work? May I point out that we both have peanut butter breath?"

"Eat up," she said again. Katie's jovial voice escalated over the music in the living room, which made me want to speed up eating to get out of there, but also made the sandwich sit on my stomach like a rock.

We went upstairs. Emily shared her bathroom with Katie and Effy, and the bathroom looked it. She brushed her teeth, then sipped straight from a bottle of mouthwash. As she swished it around in her mouth, she nudged my bare tummy with her toothbrush and prompted, "Hm."

"You wan me to use your toothbrush?"

She spit in the sink. "You might as well. You're about to do a lot worse."

**I have one more chapter to complete the party so I figure I might as well post it tomorrow so I won't keep everyone waiting. Hope you liked it!**


	14. Chapter 14

**And here, like I promised, is the last part of the party. I have a feeling this may be well liked. **

At this point, I'd realized what I thought was stress and peanut butter indigestion was actually butterflies, which began dogfighting in my stomach at the idea that Emily and I were about to kiss some more. I brushed my teeth with her toothbrush, I watched her watching me in the mirror. Her arms were folded across her chest. The bruise Katie had given her under her eye had almost faded, but the skull and crossbones pendant glinted dangerously.

If her parents hadn't been in the next room with the ten o'clock news turned way up over the news downstairs, I might have made a move on her right there in the bathroom. Yes, I know, odds were I would have tripped and knocked her down and made her hit her head on the toilet. I was so turned on, I was almost willing to take this chance.

Instead, she took my hand again and led me through the party, indoors and outdoors, to the end of the dock. The football team had run out of bottle rockets. The party had reached the stage where people played quarters. The drinking game was run very professionally by experienced people. If Mr. Fitch had found out, he would have shut down the party - because kids were drinking underage at his house, or because he would have known one of his daughters had stolen vodka from the marina. In any case, as a precaution, a wall of people stood across the dock, talking and flirting, shielding the people playing quarters from the prying eyes of the Fitches in their bedroom.

The wall of people included Katie and Mandy, facing each other and holding both hands like they were about to dance a polka. Mandy hadn't taken the precaution of kicking her shoes off before she stepped onto the dock. She was likely to catch her heel between the boards and fall flat. (Shrug) Mandy obviously valued beauty before balance.

As Emily and I approached the wall of people, Emily aimed straight for Katie. She brushed against Katie harder than necessary as we edged through. I felt Katie and Mandy watching us, but I didn't look back as we stepped over the people sprawled in a circle around a cup of vodka.

We sat on the edge of the dock. The wood was still damp and cold from the rain. We slipped our feet into the lake, which felt like a warm bath compared with the cool air.

"Do you want some vodka?" Emily asked.

"I don't think I could handle it. I feel so high already." The warm lake, the cool air, and Emily had my body going in a thousand different directions.

Maybe she knew. She grinned at me and whispered, "I'm going to kiss you now. It'll be a big one, so don't hit me." She leaned in.

"Wait a minute," I said, putting my hand on her chest to stop her. I wasn't quite ready to kiss her with people playing quarters right behind us, and with Katie and Mandy staring at us. We'd kissed before where people could see us if they wanted to look, but we'd never been so blatant about it. Besides, I had another concern. "I want to be prepared. Are you going to kiss me, or really kiss me?"

She cocked her head at me, perplexed, with those little frown lines between her eyebrows. "What would be the point of kissing if you didn't do it right?"

"Ohhhhhh!" said the group behind us. There was nowhere in my life I could get away from boys saying, "Ohhhhhhh!" I glanced behind us to make sure the boys were talking about alcohol, not us. Indeed, when the boys' quarter hit the cup and they chose someone to drink, all of them seemed to be ganging up on Freddie McClair. I hadn't seen his monster truck in the Fitch's driveway, so at least he wouldn't be driving home.

Katie had moved Mandy in front of her and held her with her arms crossed over her tits. So she could watch us over her shoulder without her knowing. Of course, she was staring at Emily, too. I rolled my eyes at both of them, like I was so tired of them watching us. I almost burst into laughter at the thought, but I managed to turn back to Emily in time.

I told her through my teeth, "We've been kissing all week without, you know. Really kissing."

"That was before Katie gave up a wake board for Mandy. Step up your game."

I was running out of excuses. "Look," I whispered, "when we do this stuff, we're trying to make them jealous, but it's also my first time for real. You know?"

Her brown eyes focused on me. We were almost nose to nose, and our shoulders moved quickly in time with our breathing, in time with each other. "I know."

"And when I fantasize about kissing" - kissing Katie, I meant, but I wasn't going to say this - "our mouths are closed."

"This isn't your fantasy."

I wasn't so sure about that. True, I'd never fantasized about this particular scenario, but maybe that was because I'd never imagined it. I had to remember this was _Emily Emily Emily_, and if I could replace her with Katie from my fantasies, the warm pricklies I was feeling would make a perfect dream. Except I would probably wake up.

Emily moved in again. One more time my brain knew this would make Katie jealous, but my body sounded the alarm. I put my hand on Emily's chest and whispered, "Give me a break. I had a bad experience with this."

She looked hurt, which didn't make sense if we were only friends. She was putting on a good act. "With who?"

"The only person I've ever kissed, besides you, is Effy."

"You kissed Ef-"

I hand't expected her reaction to be that LOUD. I reached out and grabbed the back of her hair, which turned her head away from the crowd and also shut her up right quick.

I put my forehead to her forehead and whispered like a lover, "I was eleven. We were in the warehouse and she grabbed me. Very sloppy. Don't tell Cook."

Emily blinked. I felt her eyelashes on my eyelids.

"Very, very sloppy," I said, "We still can't look each other in the eye."

I let go of her hair so she could look me in the eye. "Let me shrug that off." She shook violently like she'd caught a sudden chill. "Okay. I'm going to really kiss you, but it'll be subtle." She moved toward me one more time. "And don't tell me to back off. It's starting to look like we're not really in love."

I closed my eyes automatically as she kissed me, and the word _love_ blinked red and then black on the insides of my eyelids. Her lips were warm. Was that all? I opened my eyes.

Her eyes were still closed, and then she came in again.

I closed my eyes. She kissed me like before, only I felt her tongue between my lips, opening them. Her tongue was inside my mouth (EMILY FITCH'S TONGUE WAS INSIDE MY MOUTH) not very far, and then out again.

I thought that was is, and opened my eyes. And closed them as she kissed me once more. Now I was getting it. You didn't just sit there with your lips locked with the girl's lips and the girl's tongue turning flips at the back of your throat (cough _Effy _cough). There was constant movement and change. It was an activity. As Emily pulled away, I said, "Let me try."

She kissed me and whispered against my lips, "Be my guest." Her husky voice made me shiver.

I kissed her. Strange that the lips were so soft in such an edgy girl. I kissed her again and very gently pressed my tongue into her mouth.

She gasped. I mean, I wasn't sure, because it was in the middle of the kiss. But she seemed startled. She inhaled sharply through her nose. The she was kissing me, deeper this time.

I pulled away, laughing. "It was supposed to be my turn."

She half-smiled. Her lips stayed close to my lips.

I didn't suggest this, and she didn't agree to this, but somehow we telepathically agreed to give up on the witty conversation and make out. Her tongue played with my lips. My tongue swept across her teeth. I drowned in it, and completely lost the people playing quarters behind us on the dock until someone said, "Is anybody filming Emily and Naomi? You might be able to sell it." Katie laughed and said something I couldn't catch that made the people around her burst into laughter too.

Emily pulled back. She was embarrassed and saw our plan wasn't working. She would escape to her room, humiliated. She would leave me naked, or nearly so, in my bikini and her sweatshirt in the midst of these fully clothed people.

Wrong. She kissed me again and whispered, "There's something else you can do if you get bored with this."

Get bored with this?

"You kind of do the same thing, but move around. Here." She kissed my jaw. Her tongue touched my skin just as she pulled her lips away. "Or up here." Good Lord, her teeth were on my earlobe. Very gently she slid them off. Her tongue played outside my ear. Her breath was loud and hot.

It felt so good, and at the same time, I could hardly stand it. I needed something to hang on to. My fingers padded the edge of the dock, finding a firm hold - but this seemed potentially splintery. My other hand felt for Emily's hand.

Strangely, she must have needed something to hang onto, too. She took my hand and squeezed.

The people playing quarters may have made another comment about us, but it was hard to hear with a tongue in my ear. Also it was hard to care.

I pulled away, shoulders shaking. Emily seemed to have a hard time focusing her eyes on me, like she was in a dream. I moved in and gave her the jaw treatment. Then the ear treatment.

"Ah," she said. She giggled then cleared her throat before everyone heard her. "Naomi."

"Mm?" I hummed in her ear.

She shuddered. And then - oh, no! She stood up. I'd done something wrong! The tongue was indeed el grosso as I'd originally thought!

"I'll be right back," she told me. She picked her was across the quarters game and pushed through the wall of people watching. She had sense enough not to push through Katie and Mandy again, or they'd know the ear was for them. At least, they'd think the ear was for them. I was beginning to wonder who the ear was for. It felt like it was for me.

She came back dragging a beanbag float and nearly knocked the legs out fro under a few folks. She dragged it right over the quarters game, scattering the people, and would have spilled the vodka if someone hadn't been faster. Then she dropped the float into the lake and kicked off the part of it that sagged over the dock. She gestured toward it and grinned at me. "Your limo awaits."

I had my doubt about this. The lake was black, and the sky was black with far away stars. But anyone who drove their boat to the party this late would know to dock at the marina where there was more room. We were safe. I shrugged off Emily's sweatshirt and - without looking to see if Katie was watching me, very important - slipped into the hot water. I hadn't realized my butt was frozen solid from the cold dock. The lake was such a relief. Ahhhhhh.

Until Emily did a cannonball, socking me in the eye with water and splashing everyone on the dock, including Katie and Mandy.

"EMILY!" they all cried. She chuckled softly to herself as we held onto the raft and kicked it out into the lake, beyond the glow of light from the house.

She stopped kicking and crawled higher on the raft, straddling it. "Come up here with me."

The beanbag raft was filled with floaty bits rather than air and always seemed in danger of sinking. This could be annoying when you wanted to stay on top of the water, getting a tan. On a night like tonight, it was perfect. It would keep us from drowning while giving us more hot water than cool air.

"Now. Where were we?" She put both her strong arms around me, pulled me close, and kissed me hard.

I hadn't thought this was possible, but it was even better than before, because no one was watching. Which was actually my new problem with it. I put my hand on her chest to stop her.

She groaned in frustration. I made a mental note to make her groan in frustration more often. It seemed like something a treacherous girl would do. Also she was really cute when she groaned.

"I just wanted to know," I breathed, "why we're doing this where no one can see us."

"We think no one can. We thought no one was watching us at the bridge. We need to act the part all the time, and never step out of character." She out her hand on my arm. "If that's okay."

I nodded. I was still nodding as she pushed me gently backward until I was lying down on the raft, just under the surface of the warm water. I felt her alongside me. Almost every inch of her skin touched almost every inch of mine.

I watched the skull and crossbones glinting in the starlight, and tried to impress it on my retinas so I'd still see it when I closed my eyes to kiss her again. This was Emily, not Katie. I was after Katie, not Emily. Emily was after Mandy, not me. And if kissing Emily was better than anything I'd ever dreamed of doing with Katie... well, I could see how that was going to mess up my plans.

I kissed her anyway. The skull and crossbones lay on my throat.

"And when you kiss me," I said against her lips, "you're thinking about Mandy. Right?"

Almost before I got the last word out, she was kissing me again, harder than before, so intense I got lost in it and thought I might drown in the blackness even though my head was still above water.

I pinched her ass.

She yelped, and the yelp echoed across the lake and back. Silhouettes moves far away on the dock, peering in our direction without seeing.

"Did you hear me?" I asked.

She propped herself far enough above me to be able to see me. With one finger she smoothed a strand of wet hair away from my face. She traced the line of my cheek down to my chin. "Do you want to stop? Tell me and I'll stop."

"I don't want to stop," I said. The absolute truth, for the first time in a week. "But how far are we going to go with this?"

Emily was used to jumping off the roof. I wasn't. These were dangerous waters.

She moved to my ear again, and my body braced for the shockwaves. Just before her lips touched my skin, she whispered, "I guess we'll know when we get there."

**And that's it! I hoped you liked it, please show your love in the reviews.**


	15. Chapter 15

**Wow, you guys are really great. Thanks for all the favorites, reviews and alerts. You make me feel loved. Or my writing at least. Here's a little drama for you. **

"S-bend or what?" Emily asked me, grinning.

I'd just climbed out of the water after landing the S-bend! And even though she'd dried in the hot sun and hugging me must have been a cold, wet shock, she wrapped her strong arms around my life vest and hugged me hard. Best of all, Emily acting this way wasn't an unexpected hostess gift wrapped in Valentine's paper anymore. It was part of being her girlfriend. I was getting used to it, and I loved expecting it.

Saturday we'd gone mud riding. Then we'd parked in the movie theater lot, watched the trucks go by, and just talked. We'd shared a milkshake. I was totally immune to her germs by now. Monday after dinner, when I thought I'd have to spend the evening with Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote a good space story but was not the greatest kisser, Emily asked me to go for a walk around the neighborhood with her. We held hands, which no longer seemed the least bit weird. Here it was Wednesday, and I hadn't had more than a fleeting thought of Katie since Friday night with Emily in the lake.

I could have sworn Emily hadn't thought of Mandy, either. When she kissed me (often! Really kissed me!), it felt like she was thinking of me, not her. Yeah, she could have been faking. But as she'd said that first night at the tennis court, she wasn't exactly drama club material.

And it could come crashing down around us any minute. Emily never looked over her shoulder to make sure Mandy was watching us when we kissed. She did check Katie's reaction. I knew Mr. Fitch was wrong about which one of his girls was stabbing the other in the back, but I also knew Emily wouldn't walk away after being stabbed, any more than Katie would. So I enjoyed my time alone with Emily as much as I could. Whenever Katie came around, I held my breath, waiting for the fall.

It wasn't so long a wait. The girls looked harmless enough this afternoon. Emily, Effy and Cook had had fantastic wake boarding runs, too. They'd finally gotten their wake boarding legs back, as good as last year. Effy and Cook lounged across the seats in a boat, basking in the late afternoon sunshine like big golden retreivers, watching me drip on the platform and wagging their tails vaguely. they felt what I'd been feeling since whe first day we went out: sated with happy exertion. High.

Katie lay flattened across the bow seat, but not for the same reason. She hadn't taken her turn yet. She said she didn't want to miss a call from Mandy. She'd planned to come wake boarding with us today (amid protests from everybody else, because guests had never been allowed) and borrow my wake board since her bindings hadn't arrived yet (whatever). Her mom was going to bring her down, but they never showed. Katie had called Mandy four times from the boat (to make Emily mad, Emily and I thought) and hadn't reached her. I found this strange. Where was she? Wasn't she waiting around for Katie's call with her hand poised on the answer button of her phone?

Beyond the windsheild that seperated us from her, we heard her cell phone ring. We knew it was Mandy calling her back. And when the subsequent "Fuck!" burst over the windsheld, we knew what she'd said hadn't been very nice.

Emily shrugged and turned back to me. Unlike Katie, she didn't flirt with me by assisting me with things I was perfectly capable of doing myself. She didn't help me off with my equipment. She did sit on the back of the boat and watch me appreciatively. When I took off my life vest, she surveyed my bikini-clad hotness (ha) and gave me a naughty smile. I untied my bindings and lifted one foot out. She licked her lips like she had a foot fetish. I burst into laughter.

Katie charged past the windsheild into the back of the boat, eyes full of tears. "She broke up with me!" she wailed. "She broke up with me because she's still in love with Emily!"

We all went quiet. Only the _clack-clack, clack-clack_ of cars on the bridge and the lapping of waves against the boat disturbed the silence. Cook and Effy weren't ribbing Katie. They must have been as shocked as I was that Katie would admit what Mandy had said.

Katie was in love.

She sniffled. "I'm going to her house. Take me back to the shore." When Effy didn't immediately slip into the driver's seat, Katie took a step towards the steering wheel herself.

"Katie," Effy said, standing in her way. "You haven't landed a good trick the whole week and a half we've been coming out. We only have today, tomorrow, and Friday to practice for the Crappy Festival. Take your turn first and then go to her house."

"You cannot be fucking serious!" Katie cussed, and dove into the lake. We all rushed to the side of the boat and watched her glide to the surface twenty feet away, already swimming. We weren't so far from the McClair's yard that we needed to fish her out for her own safety. She swam until she could touch bottom, sloshed the rest of the way to land, and hit the grass running through the McClair's yard, through my yard, toward her house.

Emily said quietly, "I'm the biggest."

"Emily," I scolded her.

Effy and my brother looked from me to Emily and back to me, wondering what was going on between us. Frankly, I wondered the same thing. I wasn't sure what I'd wanted or expected Emily to say when we finally got our wish for Katie and Mandy to break up. But _I'm the biggest_ wasn't it.

We drove back to the wharf still in silence - except, of course, for the deafening motor. Emily and I sat across the aisle from each other without glancing at each other. Something was about to happen.

And everyone sensed it. Effy and Cook took more than their share of equipment into the warehouse, leaving Emily and I alone in the boat. As they came back out, Effy looked down at us from the wharf and said, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do" -which made me wish I hadn't confessed to Emily that Effy and I had kissed. After five years of hiding this from everyone, she had to hint about it now? Whatever was coming for Emily and me, it was going to be hard enough already.

Cook asked me, "Do you want me to tell Dad you'll be late for dinner?"

"No," I said. "I won't be long."

We watched Cook and Effy walk toward the houses. They stopped to talk. Effy took a swipe at Cook. Cook shoved Effy. They went their seperate ways. Friends to the end, the simplest relationship possible.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Emily snapped into the silence. "You won't be long?"

"It's dusk in the summer. Mosquitos," I said, slapping at a bug. While my mouth spouted this drivel, my mind worked on what I really wanted to say to Emily. But I had no more idea than I'd had out on the lake.

You know what didn't help? When she reached behind her neck and worked at the knot in the leather string. I knew what was coming. It took her a few seconds to get through that knot. Even though the whole time I was thinking about what to say when she asked me to turn around, I was speechless when the moment came. I turned around on my seat. She tied the skull and crossbones around my neck. The metal was hot against my breastbone. I pressed the skull between the eyes with my fingertips. Turning back to her, I mumured, "You're giving me a piece of you."

She looked over at me. We were together for real, and she was so _hot_. I should have been giggling with delight and dorkiness. The angry look in her brown eyes broke my heart.

"Mandy told Katie she likes you better," I said, "but you don't want her back. You've never wanted her back. All you wanted was to get revenge on Katie. You're giving me this to show her you don't even want what she can't have."

Emily's eyes narrowed at me. I made an effort not to shrink back against the side of the boat. She said evenly, "I'm giving it to you because I want to give it to you."

"Your timing is odd. Usually a girl wouldn't laugh at her sister hitting rock bottom, then show her love for her girlfriend practically in the same breath." Now _she_ was shrinking against her side of the boat, which made me brave enough to throw in still more sarcasm. "I don't have a lot of experience with this, but that's my theory."

She closed her eyes and said in a rush, "I'm in love with you."

I took a breath to tell her if she really meant it, she wouldn't have to say it with her eyes closed. But she didn't just have her eyes closed. Those worry lines had appeared between her brows. She was in pain, concentrating hard to make it go away, like the second time she broke her collarbone wake boarding, and lay still as death in the floorboard of the boat and wouldn't let anyone touch her but me.

She opened her eyes but remained plastered against the boat. She looked small. "That's my plot. You were right, I had a plot, and that's my whole plot. I'm in love with you. The last nine months with Cook away at Uni have been freaking torture for me, because I didn't have an excuse to come to your house. If I came over without Cook there, you'd know. I hardly saw you the whole school year. I thought I might finally have a chance with you since I was about to get my license, and you were about to get your license. We could go places together, alone. I could get you away from Katie. But the more I hinted we should go out, the more you talked about hooking up with Katie. When I heard Mandy liked me, I asked her out, and I kept asking her out. To make you jealous. And at the tennis court that night when you said we should make Mandy and Katie jealous, I nearly had a heart attack. I thought you saw right through me."

She looked so hurt, and her eyelashes were so long. I had fallen in love with her. I wished she were in love with me too. But in telling me this elaborate lie, she'd betrayed the truth.

"You don't love me," I said. "You're competing with Katie. Maybe you've even convinced yourself that you love me. But it all comes back to Katie."

Her expression changed from hurt back to anger. "Last Friday night in the lake didn't mean anything to you."

Friday night had been the best night of my life. She was picking up each thing I loved about my life, grinding it to a point, and pushing it through my heart. I'd thought only Katie knew how to do that.

"The past week and a half hasn't meant anything to you," she went on. "The past eighteen years-"

"Eighteen years!" I howled.

"You told me you're stuck on Katie," she shouted. Her voice made the metal wall of the warehouse hum. "You think your mother chose her for you-"

"No, I don't!" Well, maybe I did. And maybe I didn't care so much anymore, but this was hard to epxlain while yelling. "Look, Emily. Let's say you _had_ been in love with me all our lives, which, by the way, I don't believe for a second." Because why would any girl fall in love with a girl like me? "What you loved about me would have been exactly what I hate about myself. To stay the person you wanted, I'd have to stay the same. I want to change."

"You think your mother wants you to change," she corrected me. "Naomi, when your mother said that, she was kidding."

"You weren't there. You don't know. Your mother didn't laugh."

"My mother never laughs. It's called a dry wit. You're basing your whole life on one conversation you overheard when you were four years old that you don't even remember right."

I felt like I'd been slapped. When I'd shared my deepest secret with her, it never once occured to me that she'd throw it back in my face. Emily, of all people, had betrayed me. I stepped out of the boat, onto the wharf. "Let's end this now before we ruin our friendship."

"Too late," she called after me.

I intended to flounce across her yard and mine, but I ran straight into a cloud of gnats. I spent the rest of the walk pressing one nostril closed with my finger while I explled gnats from the other. Eat your heart out, Emily!

Except I didn't want her to eat her heart out. I wanted to be friends with her. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to make out with her in the lake some more - that was for damn sure. I wanted her to stare longingly after me from the boat as I flounced to my house, which sounded a lot like I wanted her to eat her heart out. I didn't know what I wanted.

I'd made it to my garage before I realized I was still wearing the skull and crossbones. I couldn't get the knot undone. I turned the knot around to the front but still couldn't pick it apart. The pendant was searing a whole through my skin. I cut through the leather string with garden shears and tried to grind the pendant into dust into my fist like a superhero. I opened my hand and found the outline of the skull and crossbones pressed into my palm.

I didn't sleep well that night. This was probably a good thing. If I'd had to lie through one more dream about Katie being a tease, I would have had to slap her. When I woke up and found myself sleep walking, who knew what wake boarding posters I might have destroyed? I might even have found myself choking my childhood teddy bear, Mr. Wuggles, which would have traumatized me for life.

In the morning, I walked out to the marina with the skull and crossbones in my pocket (actually, Cook's pocket, the pocket of his cutoff jeans), intending to give it back to her and say something appropriate. This would have been a stretch for me, I know. To save my friendship with Emily, I would have found a way to do it.

Jenna assigned us both to the warehouse. Great, now she finally believed we were together? I tried to look at the long day with her as an opportunity to have a heart to heart ith her. Another one. Actually the convo the evening before had been more of a spleen to spleen.

I could never find the right time. She was busy locating the boats to take down. I was busy checking the oil. The full-time workers wandered in and out. Besides, this day of all days, she worked with her shirt off. Sweat glisened on her tanned stomach, and her red hair fell in her eyes. She was so hot that I felt intimidated. She was telling me to eat my heart out, and it was working.

There were a few instances when I could have screwed up my courage, sidled up to her, handed her the skull and crossbones, and talked her down. But whenever I started toward her with this in mind, she flashed those brown eyes at me, and I felt that slap all over again.

It was such a relief to go wake boarding that afternoon. Yes, I'd be trapped in the boat for over an hour with Emily and Katie, but at least I was out of the warehouse and in the strong sun and oppressive humidity. The Crappy Festival show was in two days. We all needed to nail down the course we wanted the boat to follow and the tricks we planned to do - especially Katie. Maybe thinking about the show would get our minds off each other.

Or not. Emily climbed out of the water and onto the platform after busting ass four times. She had a stare-down with Katie, who was getting in the water for her turn. I left my seat and slid into the bow, watching ahead of us as the boat drifted across the choppy water kicked up by the afternoon traffic.

The bench sank next to me, pulling me down into the whole. "So you still want Katie?" Emily hissed. "Let me give you some advice."

"No thanks." I leaned further over the bow to watch the large waves. A whitecap rolled by. A _whitecap_? You didn't see those on the lake very often. The water was choppier than I'd ever seen it.

"At first," Emilt went on, "we thought we'd make her want something I had. You. Now she wants something you have."

"A complete lack of allure?" I asked, trying to sound bored.

"Your place at the end of the wake boarding show. Throw a jump and fake an injury. You have to make it look like you're really hurt, so Effy doesn't rib Katie about girls making sacrifices just to go out with her."

Effy cranked the boat to pull Katie up, and Cook spotted. With the motor roaring and music blaring, I was free to tell Emily (loudly) exactly what I thought of that plan. I sat up and turned to face her.

Before I could get the words out, she leaned close and said, "I told you before you're not a good actress. I have a lot more confidence in you now. I thought you liked me. You had me fooled."

I stared into her brown eyes, trying to see what was behind them. "You really want me to throw a jump and go out with Katie?"

"This has nothing to do with me," she said grimly.

"It has everything to do with y-"

She put her fingers to my lips. "If you want Katie, this is what you need to do, because this is how she is. Love her or leave her. I'm just trying to help." She slid off the seat with a high zipping sound of her shorts against the vinyl and bounced toward the back of the boat. She plopped down in the seat across the aisle from Cook and crossed her feet on the edge of the boat, relaxed, satisfied by a job well done. When Katie landed a front flip, then tumbled a couple of extra times before face-planting, Emily's shoulders shook. She was laughing.

"Naomi!" Cook shouted, standing directly in front of me. The boat drifted again, and Katie dripped on the platform. "I said, did you see the log? I guess you didn't see the log, since you're in a coma."

"Log schmog." I stood up and reached for my life vest.

Cook followed me as I stepped over Emily and Katie, who didn't bother to move their feet out of the aisle as I passed. Just like old times. "There's a huge log out near the pontoon boat," Cook said. "When we get near it, I'm veering to the right of where we usually go. Okay?"

"Okay," I said, sliding over the back of the boat to the platform and stepping into the bindings on my wake board.

"To the _right_," Effy laughed.

"I said okay." I was in no mood to be teased about my driving right now.

The drone of the motorboat was great for thinking, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on whether you hated yourself. At the moment I wasn't enjoying it too much. I was supposed to be pinning down my routine for the show, but I just did flips and 360s automatically, my mind on Emily.

Staring at her in the boat told me nothing. She was so far away that she was just a tan face with red hair, and if she'd changed places with Katie, I wouldn't have known. But I stared at the girl I thought was Emily and tried to figure out exactly what she was plotting. Clearly she'd payed more attention to Laguna Beach than she'd let on.

If I pretended to get hurt so Katie could take my place in the show, she probably wouldn't ask me out. She'd watched Emily and me while we were together, that was for sure. And I'd thought at first that the light had dawned and she'd seen my ravishing beauty for the first time. Looking back, though, I thought she'd watched Emily more than me. Katie had worried Mandy would get jealous and Emily would snatch her away again.

If Katie did ask me out, though, I'd now for sure that my internal makeover had worked - two days before the deadline of my eighteenth birthday! And I'd also know Emily had been right. Katie was so low, she couldn't stand to ask out a girl who'd shown her up. It was almost worth throwing a jump just to see what happened and get some closure on this issue.

I could do any old jump and pretend to hurt my ankle. I'd hurt it last summer when I fell and my foot came halfway out of the binding, which was why I'd laced up the the bindings so tightly since then. Faking a limp would be more difficult. But I'd need to limp for only two days, until the Crappy Festival show. The question was whether I should complain about it just enough to go to the hospital and have them find nothing, which seemed like a huge waste of time and money. Emily had hurt herself before and had been in a lot of pain but refused to go to the hospital, so there was some precedent for this. Of course, she finally had to go, and her arm was broken in three places. There was also the small detail that Emily was like that and I was not.

Suddenly I found myself shooting farther and faster beyond the boat than I'd expected. We were turning at the bridge, just under the words ENOLY LOVES NADMI. I pulled up and took control of the run.

What had I been thinking? Had I seriously been considering throwing a jump and pretending to be hurt just to get a girl? What kind of girl did you catch with a ploy like that?

And furthermore, what kind of person was Emily to give me the idea?

I decided right then that I was not going to pretend to get hurt and throw this show for Katie or anybody. Furthermore, I would skip the party tomorrow night, because there would be no one there I wanted to see, except Panda. Well, okay, maybe I wouldn't skip the party, because who could skip a party next door? But I wouldn't enjoy it. Or I would hang out with Panda, ignoring the Fitches.

Something dark in the water flashed past the corner of my eye. I turned and saw an enormous log tumbling gently in the water. Just then, the pull on the rope changed, and I remembered Cook was veering to the right to avoid the log. I veered to the right with him as I headed for the pontoon boat to ride the rails.

Only I was coming up too fast on the backside of the pontoon boat. I glanced over at the girls and motioned to Emily to slow down. I'd screwed this trick already.

Emily was motioning to me, and exaggerated wave away from the pontoon boat. And she was mouthing something. _Your other right_. I realized what I'd done then dropped the rope. The side of the pontoon boat emblazoned FITCH'S MARINA zoomed toward me, _smack_.

**I promise I didn't kill off our main character! Just wait for the next update. **


	16. Chapter 16

**Sorry this took so long to post, I've been busy lately, but not to worry, I'm back! **

This probably would have been a lot easier if I'd gotten amnesia or at least felt a little woozy from the impact, but I didn't. I knew exactly what was happening as I slipped wakeboard-first under the pontoon boat and slowed to a stop. The buoyant wakeboard on my feet and the life vest hugging my chest stuck me like magnets to the slippery underside of the boat.

My head - I had cracked my head open when I hit the boat, and the pain was almost unbearable, but I had nowhere to put it. Blood curled around me, backlit by sunbeams streaming through the water at the edges of the boat. I needed to get out from under. I was running out of air.

I tried to kick myself over to the edge - but my feet were still stuck in the wakeboard bindings. Bending over to untie them was the only way out. I would run out of air before then. I could hardly think of anything except running out of air, the throbbing in my head, the blood forming graceful curlicues in front of my eyes.

I reached one hand as far toward the edge of the boat as I could, hoping I could pull hard with every bit of life I had left and slip out from under, dragging the wakeboard with me. My hand sank into a firm, gelatinous mass. Without looking, I knew it was bryzoa. I had died and gone to hell. This was how my mother must have felt. The water had always been my friend. The water had betrayed me.

Then they came for me. They were under the pontoon boat with me, blurry and green like ghosts in the water. Cook shoved down on the wakeboard. The girl put a strong arm across my chest and pushed off from the bottom of the boat with her feet. She took me lower in the water - wrong direction, hello, I could hardly supress the urge to breathe in water instead of air. I struggled. She let me go. The wakeboard and the life vest propelled me to the surface, clear of the boat.

I popped into the air, gasping. Katie put her arms around me again and held my head above the water so I could breathe. The thought crossed my mind of rejecting a girl's help and resisting the damsel in distress role, but really it was a little thought that had no effect on letting Katie help me breathe. The more I breathed, the harder my head throbbed, so I also had a little thought that MTV would never invite me to dance on stage during one of their Spring Break specials now that I looked like the Elephant Man.

And a little thought that I had been wrong about Katie. Mum had sent me a sign. She'd sent Katie to save my life. Maybe she was worth a faked injury, after all.

Of course, there was also Cook down at my feet, and the fact that the motorboat had been only twenty yards away from me when I went down, so maybe it wasn't Mum's doing. God, my head hurt.

Cook got me loose from the wakeboard. Katie held me up to Effy in the boat, who grabbed me under the arms and lifted me in. Immediately Katie climbed the ladder and came to me. She pulled me out of the life vest, then eased me down and cradled my head in her lap.

Just like in my dream, she looked down at me. The sunlight turned her hair and shoulders and tits gold as she pressed both hands to my head.

Unlike in my dream, she dripped water and tears on my face, stinging my eyes. The blood didn't help either. Oozing from under Katie's hand, it crawled like mosquitoes on my skin. I felt pretty.

"Calm down," Cook said. "Calm down. For fuck's sake, would you calm the fuck down?"

"I'm fine," I said between heaving coughs. "At least I can move my toes, so I won't have to ride the short bus."

"I meant Emily."

I stared past the pain in my head, upward at Emily's chin. Emily held me, not Katie. I hadn't recognized her upside down, without the skull and crossbones.

"Katie," Effy called. "We've got her. Let's go."

The engine started, and the boat lurched into high speed. Down in Emily's lap, below the sides of the boat, the motor sounded muffled, more a buzz than a roar. Without music blaring, for once.

"Let me see," Cook said, bending next to Emily.

I cringed and closed my eyes and tried to go to a different place, away from the pain, as they fumbled on my forehead. Poked at my forehead. I came back from that different place and said, "DON'T TOUCH IT."

"It's going to need stitches," Cook said. "They might have to shave your hair a little. But If they do, I'll shave mine to. So will Emily. Right, Emily?"

"It's a wonder you weren't killed," Emily cried. "It's a wonder you didn't at least put your eye out."

Cook said, "Emily, would you calm down?"

I squeezed my eyes more tightly shut.

"I can't believe you actually did it," Emily said. "I can't believe you're that stupid."

"I didn't," I mouthed. That's all I could do. Katie and Emily had been my whole life for the last couple of weeks, but it was surprising how little I cared about them when I suddenly had a throbbing headache the size of the lake. Even if I'd wanted to, I didn't have the strength to fight. Emily wouldn't have believed me, anyway.

At first, all five Fitches plus Cook crowded into the emergency room with me. The nurses kicked everyone out except Jenna. They must have mistaken her for someone motherly and soothing. She barked at people and insisted on seeing their credentials before she'd let them touch me. Then Effy came back and said Emily had taken a swing at Katie and gotten them all kicked out of the waiting room. So Jenna herded them all home where they could beat the hell out of each other in peace. She sent Cook in to sit with me.

I didn't have a concussion, and they didn't shave my head or anything traumatic like that. After the first prick of anesthetic, my head didn't even hurt much. Which was a good thing, because Cook went to buy himself some snacks out of the vending machine. I lay there by myself in the hospital bed and stared at the water-stained ceiling while the doc stitched me up, scolded me, and left to find me some pain pills for when the anesthetic wore off. I felt very sorry for myself and very alone until Dad showed up, with Kieran.

Dad grasped my hand in both of his. "Naomi. Oh, my Naomi." He started to cry softly.

"Dad, I'm okay." I patted his arm: there there.

"Trevor," said Kieran. His hand was on Dad's back. "Deep breaths."

Dad sniffed a deep breath through his nose while Kieran held his gaze and moved his hands in circles in the air in front of him, encouraging him to breathe therapeutically. The way they were acting, people at the hospital who didn't know them might mistake them for a couple. A very odd couple, with Kieran in his robe and Dad in his lawyer costume from the office.

"Here," I said, easing off the bed. "Lie down, Dad."

He switched places with me, never loosening his grip on my hand. "I don't want you to be scared because of this."

"She won't," Kieran said.

"I won't," I said.

"I want you out there wakeboarding again tomorrow," he sobbed.

"I can't, Dad. The doctor said I'm not supposed to go swimming until my stitches come out in a few days."

"Then I want you wakeboarding the day they come out. And do exactly what you were doing when you got hurt."

I thought about this. "It would be difficult to replicate."

"Do you understand me?" he said, still crying.

"Shhh," Kieran said, patting his shoulder.

"Yeah, Dad," I said, looking toward Cook in the doorway. He munched his food. I twirled my finger beside my ear: crazy. Cook nodded. At least I wasn't the only sane person around here.

A nurse brought me some pills, which I took gladly because I didn't want my brain to hurt like that again, ever. They weren't supposed to be strong enough to put me to sleep, but they did. Or it was the medicine combined with the adrenaline draining away. The fatigue from nearly drowning, touching bryzoa, being sobbed over, etc. I'd had such a busy day.

All I knew for sure was that I stretched out on the backseat of Dad's car and slept on the way home. When we got there, I wasn't moving. They prodded me, but I could not see myself climbing the stairs to my room. I did not see why they couldn't let me sleep in the car parked in the garage. The backseat felt delicious.

Cook carried me up the stairs, and Dad tucked me into bed. Ahhhhhhhh, bed had never been such a relief. Dad and Cook spoke softly in the doorway.

Dad: "She didn't even wake up. You be sure and come get her if there's a fire."

Cook: "A fire. Right, Dad."

I laughed myself back to sleep. A fire. Really! In the last twenty-four hours, I'd been through everything bad I could imagine. What else could possibly happen?

**Sorry it's so short, I promise to post another one within the next few days because of the shortness of this chapter.**


	17. Chapter 17

**So we've got a lot of Katie in this chapter, I hope you enjoy it. **

"Naomi, when we're old enough, I want you to be my girlfriend." Katie kissed me. With her mouth still on my mouth, she pulled me off the bow seat and down into the floorboard of the boat, out of wind.

I broke the kiss to say, "I guess this means we're old enou-"

She cut me off by kissing me. Her tongue circled deep inside my mouth, and I opened for more. When I got bored with this (the idea of getting bored with making out still caused me to laugh, ho ho), I lifted my chin so she could kiss my neck. Then I turned my head so she could kiss my ear. Wow, this was the best dream ever, and so long! Suddenly anxious, I peered into the back of the boat to see whether the others were watching us. The boat was empty.

"Who's driving?" I gasped.

"You are," Katie said.

"Oh." This made me a little nervous, but not nervous enough to wake up or anything. I turned my head so she could kiss my other ear.

"Listen," she breathed. "What's that?"

"The boat motor," I murmured without thinking. "And Florence and the Machine."

She propped herself up on her forearms and cocked her head to hear better. "Actually, I think it's Regina Spektor." The skull and crossbones dangled above my eyes.

"Emily!" I cried, sitting bolt upright in my bed. I peered over at the clock blaring "Samson." No wonder the dream had lasted so long! My alarm had gone off, but I'd slept right through fifteen minutes of my iPod. The photo of my mother lay flat on the bedside table. Cook must have knocked it over by accident last night when he put me in bed.

"Stupid subconscious!" I slapped myself in the back of the head. "Ow!" The shock of the slap rippled through my brain and into the gash on my forehead. I cupped my hand over the stitches.

A soft knock sounded at the door. Cook leaned in without waiting for an answer. He glanced at the clock, then at me. "Breakfast is being served to the psych ward in the dining hall. You want me to send up an orderly to help you get out of bed?"

I stuck out my tongue at him. I didn't mind psych ward jokes from Cook. He was the only one who understood. Except-

"Emily came to see you."

I took in a sharp breath. "When?"

"Last night, and again this morning."

"Why didn't you wake me up?" I wailed.

"Because any other time in the history of your life, you would have snuck in my room and rearranged my sock drawer in revenge for waking you up. You know I need the argyles in the front."

"Well, what'd she say?"

Cook gathered a year's worth of wakeboarding mags and his copy of _The Right Stuff_ and stacked them neatly on the floor so he could sit on the edge of my bed. "Last night she was just checking on you. This morning she came over to say she's taking the day off work. But she wanted you to know, she's through."

"She's through? With what?" With Katie? Fighting with Katie?

"With you."

Of course she was through with me. She'd told me as such while I bled in her lap yesterday. As long as I heard it with my own ears, I could hope I'd misread the whole situation. Hearing it from Cook made it real. Almost. "Are you making this up?"

"No. She's really mad at you. I've never seen her this mad. Not even at Katie." Cook thumbed through _The Right Stuff _to make sure I hadn't gotten marshmallow on it. "But I want you to know some good will come out of your crash. It's inspired me to do something I've wanted to do for a long time."

"Remove your own appendix?"

"Ask Panda out."

My head hurt. "Panda? Why?"

"I think she's been coming to the Fitch's parties to see me. I know, I know, this seems as impossible to me as it does to you, but I really think she likes me."

I grunted a little with the increasing pain in my head. I didn't want to tell him this, but it might save him some humiliation later. "Cook, you're wrong. She's been coming to the Fitch's parties to see me. We're friends."

He squinted at me. "Why do you think so?"

"She told me so."

"Couldn't it be one of those schemes, like you and Emily are pulling on Katie? She's pretending to be your friend so she can see me without admitting that's why she's at the party."

"Panda wouldn't do that to me," I siad. My pulse began to race, and my head throbbed harder with every heartbeat. "What do you mean, one of those schemes like Emily and I are pulling on Katie?"

"I figure if you can brain yourself on a pontoon boat just to get a girl to ask you out, I can ask a girl out and brave a little rejection."

Now I winced against the throbbing in my head. "Emily told you I crashed just to get Katie to ask me out?"

"Yeah. She told me you've faked going out from the beginning. She's really mad about you crashing." Cook leaned across the bed and nabbed his copy of _The Hunt for Red October_, whcih I'd been telling him since last summer I did not borrow, when in actuality I had lost it under some (clean!) laundry and didn't come across it until last week. "Emily and Katie have always fought," Cook said, tucking the book under his arm for safekeeping. "But you've made it a million times worse. Can you imagine the five us wakeboarding together for the rest of the summer?"

"No," I admitted. It sounded about as fun as getting tooth pulled every afternoon. "But I didn't start this in the first place. Katie did. Katie stole Mandy from Emily."

"Emily never liked Mandy anyway." Cook said. "She was madder about the insult than the girl. She was in love with you. If it hadn't been for you wanting to fool Katie, Emily would have simmered down eventually and let Katie have Mandy. We'd be back to normal by now."

"Reverse, please," I said. "Emily was in love with-"

"You. Where did I go wrong? I raised a little brother, not femme fatale."

I didn't quite get it. Could Emily have been telling the truth about her plot? It seemed too good to be true, and too awful if I had screwed this up. "Did Emily say she's in love with me?"

"_Was_ in love with you. Yes, that's what she said. How the hell else would I know? I wish I didn't. This place is getting to be like that awful girls' show, what's it called? The chicks in my dorm call dibs on the TV in the rec center and won't let us watch basketball."

"Laguna Beach?"

"Yes!"

"Get out of my room."

As he stood, I made a weak grab for_ The Hunt for Red October_, but he dodged me. He closed the door behind him.

Emily was in love with me. She wasn't just saying it to keep me with her while she made Katie jealous. She was in love with me.

Head throbbing, I looked around my room, which still reflected the boy I'd been before I started transforming myself. I hadn't gotten around to a room makeover with purple flowers and a fuzzy pink ottoman. As the air conditioning clicked on, the fighter jet models I'd built from kits swayed at the end of their strings near the ceiling. I was a little brother. I was a mess.

Emily had been in love iwth me, just like this.

And now she wasn't.

It was a good thing Advil took care of my headache. If I'd had to stay out of work and spend the day at home, I would have driven myself insane (if I wasn't already). As it was, I showered faster than usual to make up for the lost time, taking care to keep my stitches out of the spray. I ate breakfast as usual, except Dad gave me a big hug and sobbed a little into my hair. As usual, Cook and I opened the door to hike across our yard and the Fitch's to the marina-

-and there stood Katie with her finger on the doorbell. She asked me brightly, "Will you go to the party tonight with me?"

My brain said _Hooray! I'm going out with Katie! My time has come!_

My body was strangely quiet. There was no happy skin. My brain reached down through my nerve endings to poke at my heart and make sure it was okay. My heart said, _Eh._ At this point I realized I did need to go back to the shrink. I sagged against the doorjamb, rolled my eyes, and uttered, "Fucking A!"

Cook stepped around me and wagged his cell phone between his fingers. With a pointed look at Katie, he told me, "Call me if you need me."

"I could take you," Katie shouted after Cook. "Bring it on." Her voice echoed around the garage. Then she turned back to me and sighed, "I was afraid you'd say that. Look, I told my dad we'd come to work a little late this morning because we're going to fish your wakeboard out of the lake. Let's talk."

I followed her down to my pier, where she'd tied the wakeboarding boat. Clearly it did occur to her to dock in a certain place to save someone a long walk. Herself. Just not me. We stepped in, and I looked around on the floor. "Who cleaned the blood out of the boat for me? I was going to do it this morning."

"Emily," Katie said. "When we get to the pontoon boat, you've got to tell me this story. She was saying it was her fault and crying the whole time." She cranked the motor and the music.

As we zoomed toward the pontoon boat, I noticed that a dump truck had mistakenly unloaded a pile of soot onto the side of the bridge. The closer we got, the more clearly I could see it wasn't a pile of soot after all but carefully applied spray paint marking out the letters ENOLY LOVES NADMI. Emily had been busy. She must have gone out in the motorboat in the near-dark last night, or the near-dark this morning. She wanted to get the offensive words off the bridge as quickly as she could. They would have haunted her until she got rid of them. She hated me that much.

"Junior!" Katie stood in front of me, clapping her hands. "Cook left your wakeboard floating here, so lets check under the pontoon boat first." She handed me one of the oars that motorboats carry in case their engines stop when they run over logs. As we poked around under the pontoons, she asked, "Why's Emily so pissed at you?"

"It's complicated. We've only been going out to make you and Mandy mad." I couldn't believe I was telling her this. But my brilliant ploys had gotten me into this fix, and I'd lost hope they could get me out. Also, I must have bled out my last lick of sense. "I've sort of had a thing for you."

She pulled her oar out from under the boat and put all her weight on it, like she needed it to keep her from collapsing. "You? Have a thing for me?"

"Had."

She made a face. "Ugh!"

This should have been the low point of my life, the one I'd dreaded for over a decade: rejection by Katie. Now that it had finally happened, I didn't feel humiliated. I was angry. "What do you mean, ugh? You flirted with me a couple of weeks ago, before your first party. Remember wiping the bryozoa on me? That's the mating dance of the brain dead Fitch sisters."

"Oh, yeah! I'd forgotten all about the bryzoa." She waved her hand in the air, dismissing the incident like a pesky yellow jacket. "Emily was acting protective of you that day for some reason. I got the idea that she might like you a little. So I figured I'd push her buttons. I can't see myself really coming on to you, ever." She shoved her oar under the boat again. "No offense."

"None taken, bitch."

She glanced sideways at me. "When I said 'Ugh,' I just meant, 'Ugh, what could Junior possibly see in little old me?'"

_Sure you did. _"I honestly can't remember," I said, poking my oar under the boat, too. "Anyway, Emily thinks I crashed into the pontoon boat on purpose so you could close the wakeboarding show again, and you'd like me better. I didn't, but Emily thinks I did." I ran my finger over the little dent my thick skull had made in the aluminum side of the boat. "I guess she was willing to take the fake love just so far."

"So you've faked hooking up."

I glanced toward the bridge, at the scribble that once had said ENOLY LOVES NADMI. "Yeah."

"You faked flirting with each other on the desk in the living room."

"Yeah." It hadn't felt like faking, but what did I know?

"You faked making out on the end of the dock at the party last Friday? And disappearing into the lake? Because that was convincing."

"Yes. I mean, we really made out, but we weren't really in love." At least, I hadn't realized it at the time.

"That little shit!" she yelled so loudly that I worried about the innocent little ears of Kieran and the Jones children around the bend. I imagined Kieran pretending he hadn't heard a thing as the shout echoed around their fenced yard.

"Now why are you so pissed?" I asked.

"Because it worked! She stole Mandy from me!"

I stomped my foot on the floor of the boat, like a girl. "You stole Mandy from her in the first place, just to make her mad. Even if you thought you really liked her by the time she broke up with you, she only seemed like something you'd want because Emily had her in the first place."

She brought in her oar again and leaned on it. "I may be shallow, Naomi, but I'm not a monster." She gazed downstream. "I don't think your wakeboard's under here. Maybe the current caught it."

I looked downstream, too, in the general direction of the dam several miles away. My wakeboard had probably gotten stuck in one of the gates and cut off power supply to a city. The way my morning was going, the hydroelectric police would be waiting for me on the marina dock.

"Let's try one more place." She cranked the engine, drove to the nearby bank, and cut the power again. As the boat drifted, we used the oars to shift the logs and leaves washed up against the edge of the woods. "You think I'm a monster," she said quietly.

"I think we all are."

A gust of wind blew us along faster. It swooped through the woods, swaying the trees and littering us with blossoms and leaves and delicate tree shit.

"Well," she finally said. "I didn't steal Mandy just to make Emily mad. I pretended that's what I was doing. That's what Emily would think anyway, But really, I've been into her for so long. I couldn't stand the thought of going away to Uni without finding out if she liked me, too."

I was going to yell at her for being so selfish until it occured to me that this was pretty much how I'd felt about her.

"I've seen the way she looks at Emily," she went on. "Girls don't look at me like that. They look at me, sure, but not like that."

Cunning as Katie was about other people, surely she couldn't be this obtuse about herself? In exasperation, I pointed out, "You don't look at them like that."

"I looked at Mandy like that. And she says she can tell from the way I treat Emily that I have no soul. I could have sworn I did." She laughed.

Mandy might have more sense than I'd given her credit for. She'd never actually insulted me, besides calling me a slut to her friends when I did the secret handshake with Emily, which was understandable. I had no reason to dislike her, other than the obvious girl-ploys. And no reason at all to think she's stupid.

"But over the last couple of weeks," Katie continued, "I've seen how good you and Emily are together. Maybe Emily and Mandy are good together, too, but if they are, I'd like to rip Mandy's heart out and throw it down in the driveway and drive back and forth over it in my car a couple of times and give it back to her. I know you feel the same way about Emily."

I stared at her and wondered what my mother had been thinking.

"I don't think we need to worry about that, though," she said. "Mandy wants to get back with Emily, but Emily doesn't want Mandy, if you can believe that! She called her last night after she dried up and had this, like, reasonable, adult conversation with her. She told her it was over between them, and not just because she'd made out with me when I snapped my fingers. She went out with her in the first place to make you jealous."

None of this sounded like something Emily would share with Katie on purpose. Cook, maybe, or Effy, but not Katie. "Did you listen in on this conversation?"

Katie gave me this _how are you insinuate such a thing_ look. Which told me, yes, she had listened in on this conversation.

She went on, "So we know they won't get back together. If they do look like they're getting back together at the party tonight, Emily will be faking. All we have to for you to get her back is convince her you're better than nothing. Which..." She looked me up and down, then shrugged.

The wind gusted again, lifting sections of her dark, red hair, and flattening her T-shirt against her tits. She was a lot like Emily, and completely different. I said, "You are a sad, sad little girl."

"I am what I am. So, I know this will sound kind of repulsive, but will you make out with me at the party?"

I poked at the shoreline with my oar. "This is a bad idea. It was a bad idea the first time I had it, and it's a bad idea now." But I might as well try something to get Emily back, right? I'd hit bottom. Nothing we did could make things worse.

"If you won't do this for yourself, do it for me, Naomi, I'm in love with Mandy. That's never happened to me before. I'm not willing to let that go without a fight. And if you feel the same way about Emily, seems like you wouldn't let it go, either." She took a few steps closer to me in the boat. "She holds a grudge, you know."

I snorted. "I know." Nothing had ever been more obvious.

"You can't just hope she'll come around someday. She won't. You have to bring her back. Hey, what do we have here?" She leaned way over the side of the boat, grabbed a flower-printed edge underneath a log, and brought up my dripping wakeboard. Handing it to me, she said, "Your chariot, mademoiselle."

It was exactly like something Emily would say. I clung to the wet wakeboard and squeezed my eyes shut to keep from crying. "Okay," I said. "I'll do it. Okay."

It all would have been hilarious if it hadn't sucked. 


	18. Chapter 18

And I couldn't go through with it. When Cook said he was heading for the party, I stayed behind. I actually started the enormous project of picking up all the books and magazines scattered three deep on the floor of my room. After about an hour and hardly any progress, I realized that by shelving them, I was messing up a filing system I didn't even know I had. Books I wanted to read again were thrown on one side of my bed. Bad books were abandoned by the window. Wakeboarding magazines were strewn from my dresser to my desk in approximate order of how hot the girls were in them, and so forth. I gave up and sat downstairs in the den with my dad for a long time, watching _Dirty Jobs. _

My cell phone rang. I pried it from the pocket of my tight miniskirt. I knew girls were supposed to carry purses instead of stuffing everything in their pockets, but I needed to ease into this transition over the coming year. Sirens weren't built in a day. "Hello?"

Katie was on the other end of this line, making chicken noises.

I hung up and said bye to my dad. Again, I didn't notify him what was going on with my many suitors. I figured the situation would change anyway in the next fifteen minutes or so.

Katie stood in the doorway of the Fitch's house, letting all the air conditioning out into the hot night. Waiting for me. "Where have you been?"

"Duh, I've been next d-"

She grabbed me, pulled me into the foyer, and slammed the door. "Mandy and Emily are inside talking. To each other! And I've told everybody here that you and I are together. When you didn't show up, it looked like you didn't love me as much as I love you."

"Stop the presses."

"So we need to make up for lost time."

She body-slammed me against the wall and stuck her tongue in my mouth.

Well, I just let her do it. Why not? I let her slide her hands up and down my sides, too, in case that helped the cause. If she wanted to touch my tits, I would need to take that under advisement, but otherwise I found I had a very high tolerance for a beautiful ass of a girl using me as target practice.

Besides, out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mini and Grace watch us from the end of the hall. They disappeared around a corner. Next a couple of guys from my maths class walked really slowly by the opening, pretending not to watch us.

Katie came up for breath. I tried not to gasp quite as hard as I had after bashing my head and nearly drowning.

"How many gawkers is that?" she asked.

"Four," I said. "Is that enough to spread it around the party? And how can you stand to kiss a girl like that when you don't feel anything for her?"

She rubbed the back of my neck, like a lover. "I feel something for you. You clean up okay. Don't you feel something for me?"

I shook my head. "I'm not feeling you, dog."

"Don't shake your head," she said through her teeth. "We're going into the party now. Don't do anything negative. Agree with everything I say. Laugh a lot. Can you put your hands under my shirt on my tits?"

"Fuck no, I cannot." I didn't remember anything like this happening in _Pride and Prejudice_. "Can I find Panda, take her to the bathroom with me, and giggle about you?"

Her eyes widened in admiration. "That would be awesome!"

I was getting good at this. I gave her a peck on her smooth cheek, patted her ass, and walked into the living room.

Every head snapped up to watch me.

Including Emily's. There were thirty-something people in the shadowy room, and I saw her right away. She sat on the couch with Mandy, exactly where Katie had sat with her the night she insulted me. Emily wasn't wrapped around Mandy the way Katie had been. She wasn't touching her at all. She was talking to her. They could have been friends.

So they weren't doing anything to make me jealous. All she did was look up at me with such fury in those brown eyes that I knew I was going to throw up.

"Help," I croaked, putting a hand on Panda's shoulder.

She looked around at me. She looked at the people she'd been talking with: Effy and Cook. "Can Effy help you?" she asked me coldly. "She's her sister, so she could help you better. James and I were talking."

Hadn't she heard Katie's blitzkrieg rumors? I wasn't pretending to hook up with Emily to get Katie. Surprise! I was pretending to hook up with Katie to get Emily, and if ever something was giggle-in-the-bathroom material, this was it. I was calculating how much of this to divulge to her while Effy and Cook were listening, when something else clicked in my brain. "Are you guys going out?"

"Yes!" Cook beamed.

Panda beamed too, then tried to hide the smile as she realized she'd been busted.

"So," I said to Panda, "when you told me you came to the last party to see me, really you were using that as an excuse to see Cook."

"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings," Panda said distantly, a tone she'd never used with me before. The tone Mini used all the time. "I guess I didn't understand you and I were that close."

"I guess it was my mistake," I said.

"I want to go back to Uni," Effy said. "Linear Differential Equations class will seem so relaxing after this summer."

Cook frowned at Panda, then moved toward me like he would pull me away and talk to me. But Cook didn't go out much. He'd actually asked someone out! I didn't want to mess up this thing with Panda for him. Not over some weird girl-jealousy that I didn't even understand completely.

"I gotta do something," I mumbled, pulling the skull and crossbones from my pocket. This took a couple of tries when my fist got stuck.

Across the room, Katie stood with some of her many friends. Down by her side, where the crowd couldn't see, she motioned to me. Mandy and her friends were right behind her. If I went to her, she'd make sure they saw everything that counted.

From the sofa on the other side of the room, Emily glared at me.

I took a step toward Emily. The force of her glare was like a magnet turned the wrong way against another. I took another step toward her and felt the force in my stomach. I would never be able to reach her in the face of such force. Plus Freddie McClair was trying to start a mosh pit in the center of the room. So I skirted the force like I was headed out the door to the deck. Then, when Emily bit her lip and looked down, I snuck past the repellant force and plopped next to her on the couch.

"Here." I held out the skull and crossbones in my sweaty palm. Attractive! It didn't matter anymore. "Look," I said in a rush, "I didn't crash into the pontoon boat to get Katie. Even I am not that unbalanced."

Her mouth moved so little that I almost thought she used telepathy to tell me, "I don't believe you."

"No shit. And I'm sorry about the PDA with Katie. I don't know what I was thinking, Emily. I want another chance with you, and I know that wasn't the way to get it."

"That's okay," she said so brightly, so unlike her, that I knew something evil was coming. "I like Katie taking my seconds."

"See, that's the problem," I snapped, angry again despite myself. "You say you love me, but you're always looking over your shoulder for Katie."

"And you're always looking over your shoulder for Katie. Or Mini, or Grace." The Foo Fighters song booming through the room ended at the precise moment she said, "Or whoever's made you change from what you were into a first-class bitch."

Only a moment more of silence ticked by before Fall Out Boy started. But the damage was done. People at the edge of the crowd were slow to start dancing again. They thought we couldn't hear them over the music as they yelled in clear voices, "Did you hear what Emily called Naomi?"

I told myself she wouldn't have said anything so horrible to me if she weren't jealous. Of course, I'd told myself the same thing when Katie mentioned the shrink. But Katie was Katie, and Emily was Emily. And while I was trying to use my intimidating brain power to turn myself into water vapor and vanish into thin air, Emily snatched the skull and crossbones from my open palm. "I have just the use for this," she said as she stomped out the door to the deck.

I left my sparkly shoes on the floor next to the couch. I knew that jig was up. But even in my bare feet, I didn't make it outside before Emily was on the ground far below, halfway to the dock. Possibly she'd jumped over the deck railing.

I dashed down the stairs. Katie called to me from the deck above me. I dashed faster. This was no time to save face. I had a terrible feeling about that skull and crossbones.

Sure enough, by the time I'd pushed through the crows in the yard and the wall of people on the dock, Emily was sitting with the boys playing quarters. I stepped forward to stop her. It was too late. Instead of a quarter, she bounced the pendant on the dock. And instead of ringing the cup, the skull and crossbones slipped in between two planks, into the lake.

"Ohhhhhh!" said the other boys.

"Get it," I told Emily.

She said thoughtfully, "No."

I pictured it sinking through the water, but it wasn't heavy enough to stay in one place on the bottom. The current would sweep it away if she didn't hurry. "I bought it for you!" I shreiked.

"I wore it for you," she said evenly. "And now I'm through with it."

I shoved back through the wall of people, jumped into Mr. Fitch's personal fishing boat tied on one side of the dock, and grabbed a big waterproof flashlight. I didn't have to push through the wall of people on my way back because they saw me coming and got out of my way. I walked straight through the game of quarters, scattering the frightened players. I sensed rather than saw Emily's hand reach for my ankle and miss as I hopped into the lake in my adorable clothes.

The water was warm and black. Oops. I clicked the button on the flashlight and directed the beam underneath the pier. The water was only about eight feet deep here, so I was able to kick down to the rocky bottom, where I thought the pendant had fallen through.

In the eerie green light, I saw it glinting on a big branch the girls had lodged under the dock to attract fish. That was bad enough, because wood got slimy in water. But this was worse: the pendant glinted from its resting place in A GLOB OF BRYOZOA clinging to the branch. Ugh, ugh, ugh, and the pendant moved as the bryozoa bobbed in the current. Any second now, the skull and crossbones would tumble deep into the lake, lost forever.

My breath was gone. I swam toward the surface to collect one more breath. I didn't expect half the school to be peering over the side of the dock, watching for me in the darkness. That was okay. I was on a mission to PLUNGE MY HAND INTO THE BRYOZOA OH MY GOD. I took my breath and dove back down-

And someone on the dock grabbed me around the waist. Someone strong who wasn't dislodged from the dock when I struggled. Freddie lifted me backward out of the water.

"Let me go!" I hollered, not looking at him, still leaning toward the water and trying to struggle free. The flashlight clattered to the dock. "I saw it. I can still get it. Let me go!"

"You're not supposed to get your stitches wet," Emily said.

I wanted to point out that she wouldn't know this, since she didn't stick around the emergency room long enough to hear what the doctor had to say. Then I remembered Emily had a lot more experiance with stitches than I did.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blur, and Emily was gone. An enormous splash backed everyone away from the water. Emily and Katie flailed in the lake.

"Get their parents," I said over my shoulder. If Effy or Cook had been there, they would have stepped forward before now. Adn Katie's friends and Emily's friends never intervened, like fights between sisters were somehow sacred. I watched Emily and Katie in the water to make sure neither of them went down for too long - though there wasn't much I could have done if they had. Nothing seemed to be happening behind me. The crowd watched the show as attentively as I did. I turned around and screamed, "Go get their parents!" Three people ran up the dock and through the yard.

I jumped out of the way as one of the girls hauled herself up the ladder. She snapped her legs up before the other girl could drag her back into the lake. But then the second girl grabbed the top of the ladder, swung herself onto the dock, and tackled the first.

There didn't seem much point in explaining to Emily that Katie had only attacked her becasue Katie and I were pretending to be a couple and trying to make Emily jealous. After one of them had hit the other, it didn't really matter why anymore, at least not to them. I bent as close to them as I dared and hollered, "I've already told your parents."

"Katie, stop," came Mandy's voice from the crowd, ever-helpful.

I expected them to roll toward me. I'd have to jump out of the way as they wrestled on the dock and caught each other in various choke holds. Instead, the girl on top punched the one on bottom, a pop to the nose. The fight came to an abrupt stop.

The crowd gasped. They murmured, "No, that's Emily on top. Emily kicked Katie's ass."

Emily sat on Katie, her right fist clenching and unclenching. I couldn't see her face or Katie's in the dim light, but I could tell from the way they held themselves that they were giving each other the evil eye. And I knew I shouldn't be worried anymore about pulling Katie off Emily, protecting Emily from Katie.

Emily said so quietly I could hardly hear her over the waves lapping against the dock, "Don't you ever hit me again."

The murmur up the hill increased, and the crowd in the yard began to part. Mr. Fitch was coming. But it was Jenna who came running in her bathrobe.

"Katie!" she called when she hadn't even hit the dock yet. "Katie, get off her!" As the crowd slowed her down, she said, "You two have got to stop doing this. You're going to kill each other." She made it through the wall of people and stopped short.

"I'm through," Emily said. She eased off Katie and stood up.

Katie sat up, looking down. Her nose streamed blood.

Mr. Fitch said behind us, "Hey. Is that my vodka?"

I'd seen enough. I pushed my way through the crowd, up the pier, into the grass. Knots of people followed me with their eyes, turning as I passed. Effy, Cook, and Panda jogged down from the house. Panda called to me. I shook my head and kept going. They didn't come toward me. They must have seen the expression on my face.

When I reached the darkest shadows of the trees between our houses, I looked back. Jenna stood in front of Emily in their yard, with her hands on her hips. She shivered in her soaked clothes. Jenna put out her arms for her. She walked into her embrace and put her head down on her shoulder. Jenna rubbed her back to warm her.

Furious as I was with her, I hoped she didn't get in too much trouble - about the alcohol, and especially about the fight with Katie. I hoped her parents understood this fight was inevitable, with or without Mandy and me. And that tonight was the first night of the rest of her life.

**Only two, possibly three more chapters to go! I'm going to miss writing for you guys. Hope you liked this chapter.**


	19. Chapter 19

**Hey guys! I apologize for the lack of updates, I got caught up in real life. Which included quite an eventful Mardi Gras. And I seem to be dealing with the deterioration of my relationship in real life, too. But I managed an update for you. **

It was not, however, the first night of the rest of my life. It was night 5,843, and it felt like it.

I stepped into the kitchen and closed the door. I dripped all over the floor. Dad freaked out about stuff like this. Someone might slip! I'd have to find a towel in the laundry room and drag it behind me all the way to the den - unless, of course, he heard me come in and called to me to ask how my night went. Then I'd have an excuse to skip the towel. I could sit in his lap, even though I was soaked. I could break down, and he could tell me what to do about Emily.

He didn't call to me. Maybe he hadn't heard me in my bare feet. I opened and closed some kitchen drawers gratuitously. Still he didn't call to me.

I gave up, got a towel out of the laundry room, and scooted it across the floor with my feet, catching the water that dripped from me. As I headed through the den to the stairs up to my room, I saw Dad. He'd fallen asleep on the sofa in front of the TV, cell phone gripped on his chest. I was on my own.

I walked up the stairs, which took more energy than usual. There were a lot of stairs. Thirteen to be exact:

Made

You

Change

From

What

You

Were

In

To

A

First

Class

Bitch

By the time I got to the top, I was pooped, and not furious anymore. Confused and hurt about Panda. Hurt and sad about Emily.

A long time paused before I realized I was standing in my dark room, listening to the laughter and music from the party outside.

Closing my door behind me, I slid my wet clothes off. Oh God, dead wet phone in my skirt pocket. There went my birthday money from my grandparents. I didn't need to turn on the light to find my mother's sweet sixteen disco dress in my closet, because it practically glowed in the dark. I slipped it on and walked to the window.

Katie and Emily lay on that strip of grass between our yards where they liked to fight each other because Jenna couldn't see them from their house. Emily and Katie had finally killed each other! No - Emily's arms were behind her head. Katie's legs were bent, with one foot propped casually on the opposite knee. They watched the stars, talking.

Talking!

Emily sat up. She wore her sweatshirt with the football number on the back, the one I'd borrowed last weekend. She shook a little like she was shivering again. She stuck her hands in her pockets. She pulled out one hand and looked at it, then looked over her shoulder at my house. She'd found my eyelash comb.

Maybe she saw my dress glowing in the moonlight, because she turned all the way around to stare. Now Katie sat up and turned around, too. I hope I creeped them out like Miss Havisham (_Great Expectations)_

One of them was Emily. Tingles crept up my arms and scross my chest at the thought of her watching me. This would have to stop. Pining after Katie had been enough. At least I'd always thought pining after Katie would have a happy ending. I knew no good would come from pining after Emily. Plus, it was a lot more real to me now, not a cartoon relationship lost but a real girlfriend, a real friend. I choked back a sob as my throat closed up.

I watched her for a little longer. Yes, I could tell her from Katie, even at a distance, even in the dark. The way she moved around her head, the way she tapped her fingers on the ground in that fidget I'd fallen in love with. That could have been me instead of Katie, sitting with Emily in the dark. But there wasn't a way to fix this.

Ten years from now, I'd be married to someone I'd met at Uni. Emily would be married to someone she'd met on the bomb squad. We'd all come home to visit our parents at Thanksgiving. Emily and I would see each other out on the docks. We would feel obliged to talk for a few minutes and laugh uncomfortably about this one summer that had ruined our friendship forever. And then we'd walk away.

I looked at the clock on my bedside table behind me. 12:02. I closed the window shade, blocking out the party and Katie and Emily. I slipped off the disco dress and folded it into a bog box with the scrapbook Mum and I had made to fill in with pictures of my eighteenth birthday. Standing in a chair precariously balanced on books, mags, and Mr. Wuggles - God only knew what was under there, really - I slid the box onto a shelf in the top of my closet. Where it belonged.

I woke to Mumford and Son's "Liar."

My body had gotten used to waking at this time. I didn't remember my dreams.

I would miss them.

But I tried to shake it off. I tried not to wish Emily would show up with a birthday present for me - even though I'd forgotten to get one for her! I would have the usual birthday breakfast with Dad and Cook, just like every year, and then I'd try to get through my first day of avoiding my ex-best friend. While I worked at her parents' marina. And she worked there too. Easy.

For breakfast, Dad made me pancakes with blueberries in the shape of smiley faces, because he was a loser. Between the butter and the syrup, Cook handed me a long tube-shaped present. Actually it was just a wrapping paper tube with the wrapping paper still on it, and something rolled up inside. Boys were like that. He saw my look and shrugged. "It would have been a waste of perfectly good wrapping paper. This worked."

Still giving him the look, I pulled out the contents of the tube and unrolled a wakeboarding poster. "Dallas Friday!" I exclaimed. "Dallas Friday shattered her femur doing a whirlybird."

"I thought it was perfect given the occasion," Cook said. "Fearless."

Dad cleared his throat and pushed a little box across the table to me. It was beautifully wrapped with an intricate bow that most girls would keep on their bulletin boards. Obviously wrapped in a store. I slipped the bow off intact and tried to unstick the paper without tearing it. It tore by accident and then, what the hell, I ripped it off.

I flipped open the velvet ring box. Inside was a silver ring with pearls and diamonds. It looked real. Was I supposed to bite it to make sure? No, that was gold coins in cowboy movies. It also looked vaguely familiar. "You didn't get this at the store."

"I had them check the settings," Dad said. "They cleaned it and wrapped it for you."

I examined the ring more closely. "It belonged to Mum."

"Her parents gave it to her for her eighteenth birthday."

I looked into his eyes, so full of concern. We had a touching moment. Then of course Cook dropped his fork and went under the table to hunt for it, and it was hard to keep the touching moment going while Cook sat on my toes. "Ow!" I kicked him.

"When you were younger," Dad said, "I thought you'd never wear it, because it wasn't your style. Lately, I'm not so sure. I thought I should give you the choice."

I freed it from the box and slipped it onto my finger. It was a crazy ring, diamonds glinting in contrast with the smooth pearls. And it was heavy. If I ever got in a fix in a dark alley, I could use it as brass knuckles. Or if I was cornered on a rooftop, I could hook it on a clothesline and slide to freedom like James Bond. Don't try this at home.

"I'll wear it because it's a part of me," I said. "Thank you, Dad." I walked around the table and hugged him. Then I at back down, took another bite of pancake, and stared straight ahead at the empty chair.

And I realized for the first time ever that we kept an empty chair at the table. There were three of us. You would think we would have three chairs normally, and bring in a fourth when Emily came to dinner, which clearly wouldn't be happening anymore. It wasn't like the table was square, and a chair was missing from the fourth side would be conspicuous. The table was round, and could have three chairs as easily as four or five or eight.

I was swallowing my pancakes in order to point this out when Dad siad, "I need to tell you something, James. I don't want you to see me on the bank during the wakeboarding show and wipe out because of the shock. We've had enough wakeboard falls for one lifetime." He took a sip of coffee. "I have a date for the Crappie Festival." He took another sip of coffee. "It's Kieran."

I sat still, thinking back to that talk I'd had with Kieran. He'd said, _You're the only one who comes to visit. Except- _

Cook didn't budge, either. Dad must have taken our non-reaction as disapproval. "I never said anyting while he worked here," he hurried on. "I never did anything. We were coping so well, for a greiving family-"

"Except for when you sent me to the shrink," I pointed out.

He continued more loudly, "-and I was terrified of messing that up." He turned to Cook. "But now you've got a foot or two out the door." He turned to me. "And you're-" He sighed. "Grown. I thought it would be okay now." He took another sip of coffee, nonchalant, but his eyes darted to Cook and me in turn. "Even if it's not okay, I'm still going out with him."

We sat in silence for a few moments more. Then Cook hollered, "I knew it!"

"It's all very _Jane Eyre_ of you, Dad," I said. Cook and I had read _Jane Eyre _for fun a few years ago.

Cook snorted. "Hide the lighter fluid."

"Check the attic," I said.

Dad sat back in his chair, relaxing a little.

"No wonder he used to get so mad when Katie sang to him from _The Sound of Music_," Cook said.

"Does this mean we have to start drinking soy milk again?" I asked Dad.

"I'm glad we've gotten this settled," Dad said. "James, what'd you dream about?"

Cook blinked at the change of subject. "I can't tell you."

"Why not?" I grinned.

"She's a real person."

I took this as my cue to head for the marina. Dad would probably coax the dream out of Cook - Dad was a lawyer, after all - and I didn't particularly want to hear just then about Panda beating Cook at wrestling in chocolate pudding.

But Cook stood when I did. Dad looked up at him and said, "You take care of your sister today."

Cook shrugged. "How?"

Dad looked at me. "And you watch out for those girls."

It was way too early in the morning for a breakdown, so I squeezed my eyes shut to hold back the tears and stepped out the door, calling, "I'm afraid I have nothing to be afraid of."


	20. Chapter 20

**Last one guys! Sorry for the extreme break between chapters, life caught up with me and I couldn't figure out a way to end this. Thanks for all the reviews and support!**

In the garage, balanced on the handle of the seed spreader, looking out of place between the lawnmower and the tiller, was a long-stemmed pink rose.

Cook passed me. I called, "Panda left you a gag gift."

He hardly glanced at the rose on his way out the garage door. "Pink isn't my color."

Kieran must have left it as a joke for Dad, then. I should take it into the kitchen before it wilted. Almost wishing it were mine, I ran my finger across a soft petal. My hand found a pink ribbon tied around the stem, then a tag hanging from the ribbon. The tag said in Emily's scrawl, "YES it's for you." I let a little laugh escape even as my eyes filled with tears.

She'd called me a bitch. I wasn't running back to her when she left me one rose. On the other hand, there was no need to stuff it down the garbage disposal. Maybe Emily and I could be friends again after all. Someday. Besides, I adored the scent of roses: perfume and dirt. I put the blossom to my nose, inhaled deeply, grinned, and headed to work.

Another rose lay atop the woodpile.

A third was tied to an oak tree with a hangman's noose fashioned from a kudzu vine.

A fourth stuck out of a broken brick in the seawall.

A fifth lay across the handles of the doors into the marina. They all smelled so lovely, my blood pressure hardly went up when Jenna shrieked at me, "Where have you been?"

She must have freaked out because the marina was already swamped with customers. The Crappy Festivities today were divided among the town swimming park and the three biggest marinas on this section of the lake, including ours. We got the crowning of the Crappy Queen. I wished we got a more interesting event, such as the Crappy Toss. I could have thrown a dead fish as far up the beach as anybody. The Crappy Queen contest was just a bunch of high school girls parading up and down the wharf as Mr. Fitch called their names and announced the weights of the biggest fish they'd caught all year, and what bait they'd used. At least the event did its job of bringing customers in.

Well, if Jenna wanted me there sooner, she should have told me the day before. "Where have I been?" I repeated. "I get asked that a lot for some reason."

She took the roses from me without comment and shoved me into the show room, where a small crowd of people in shorts milled between the displays. "It's been a revolving door in here ever since we opened this morning," she hissed. "People want to buy wakeboards, and they want to buy them from you."

"Wow! Really?" I'd feel a little guilty selling people wakeboards, considering my experience two days before. But after all, my wreck was caused by a brain cloud and a broken heart, not equipment failure. I patted my head to make sure my bangs hung down over my stitches.

"Yes, really!" Jenna said. "Emily's been covering for you, but she just mumbles at customers."

"Where is Emi-," I started to ask. Then I saw her hair, and the door to the warehouse closed behind her. Where she'd stood, a rose protruded from behind a Liquid Force on the wall.

She'd called me a bitch. I wasn't running back to her when she left me six roses. But I did extract the new rose carefully and put it with the others in the vase Jenna set on the counter. Then I found another rolled up in the boat twine, and still another lying across the containers of worms.

In the late morning, as I manned the cash register (after pulling out the rose inside), Dad and Kieran came in. My heart pounded when I saw Kieran. I wanted to vault over the counter and throw my arms around him. Instead, I asked him, "Are you to be my new mother?"

"Naomi!" My dad burst out. Flushing red, he realized he desperately needed a new slalom ski _right then_, and bolted for the display.

Kieran watched him go. "Very funny," he told me through his teeth. Then he leaned across the counter, kissed me on the forehead, and gave me a grudging smile. "Happy Birthday."

"Thank you."

He reached for my hand. "What a beautiful ring." He moved my finger back and forth so the ring glittered under the fluorescent lights, and smiled at me once again. "Your mother would be proud of you."

"What a pretty robe," I said. "Is it hemp?"

Holding his chin high, he said self-righteously, "It's organic cotton." He took a long whiff of the roses. "You and Emily have gotten yourselves in a mess, I hear. 'Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to deceive!' Sir Walter Scott."

I patted his hand. "That's nice, dear."

"An honest man's the noblest work of God.' Alexander Pope."

I squinted across the showroom. "I think I have a customer."

My dad recovered and decided he could put off that slalom ski purchase after all. He came to the counter, put his hand on Kieran's back, and asked him, "Is Naomi giving you lip?"

"She's making fun of me!" Kieran exclaimed in mock astonishment. "I'm offering her aphorisms and she's making fun of me!"

"They do that." Dad turned to me and said, "We're going to wish James luck before the show. Aren't you at least riding in the boat with the boys?

"Ha! I'd rather go shopping." Snort.

As Kieran pushed open the door into the sunshine, he said something in Russian. Something long that he was determined to get out in full. Dad stood in the doorway and waited for him with a look of pure love when he finished.

I didn't need any sage advice on honesty and I definitely didn't need any from Dostoyevsky. "Do svidanya," I muttered. Then I realized the customer from across the showroom was approaching the counter. "May I help-" It was Panda.

She slid a candy bar onto the counter. "Hook me up, would you? Now that I have a boyfriend, I'm trying to maintain my girlish figure."

As I scanned the candy into the register, I looked over my shoulder to see whether Jenna was listening from the office. I'd told customers off before when Jenna wasn't around, if they really pissed me off. Panda was Cook's girlfriend. I didn't want to be the annoying sister she dreaded seeing when she came over to our house. But fuck if she was going to follow me around and taunt me! She could have bought a candy bar somewhere else.

She must have seen I was gearing up to tell her off. She knew me better than I'd thought. Either that or she recognized the fixed killer stare I got before I served an ace. For whatever reason, she said in a hurry, "What draws me to Cook as a boyfriend is the same thing that draws me to you as a friend. You're both so honest, to the point of being clueless. After years of being stuck at tennis tournaments with Mini and Grace, it's refreshing."

"You're not helping yourself here."

"And if I wanted honesty, I should have been more honest myself. When you left the party, I told Cook what I did to you. He didn't un-ask me out, but I could tell he was disappointed."

Cook would never un-ask a girl out. Even if he hated her guts, he'd keep his promise and act like a gentleman about it. I didn't tell Panda this because she was genuinely concerned about what he thought of her now. It was sort of sweet. "If it makes you feel better," I told her, "he dreamed about you last night."

"He did?" Her face glowed in the sunlight streaming through the showroom windows. Then she quirked her eyebrows at me. "He tells you about his dreams?"

I nodded. "Me and Dad, every morning at breakfast. Are you going to pay for that?"

She dug in her pocket, peered at the change in her palm, and picked out some coins. She had the same purse-carrying issues I had. "Anyway," she said, "I'm sorry for using you. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I didn't give it a thought. But I should have."

"Maybe I'd like to be used by a girl." As she passed me the change, I said, "I'd like to be good enough friends with a girl that we use each other without asking, and help each other without question. I'd like to know a girl always had my back." I tossed the coins in the register and slammed the drawer shut. The nickels had slid into the dime compartment, which would drive Jenna insane.

Panda nodded. "We'll work on it. So, the wakeboarding show's starting soon. You want to go watch it with me?"

"Can't," I said, gesturing to the crowded showroom that was my responsibility. Wait a minute - it had emptied when I wasn't watching.

Jenna popped her head out the door of the office. She gazed suspiciously at the cash register drawer, like she just knew something was amiss in there. "Naomi, why don't you take a few hours off? You should go outside and watch Cook and the girls."

"I don't want to go outside and watch them." Actually I did. More than anything. I'd never missed a show before. And I'd never missed Emily so much. But I wanted to watch them from the roof or a tree or somewhere else Emily wouldn't see me watching them. She'd called me a bitch. I wasn't running back to her when she left me nine roses.

Jenna folded her arms. "Go outside anyway."

I folded my arms too. "I don't want to go outside."

"Well, I don't want you to work."

"I want to work."

She pointed at me and screamed like I imagined real mothers did when their daughter turned out too much like them. "You're fired!"

"All right!" I threw my register key onto the counter and stomped outside.

Then turned right back around, smacked into Panda, stepped inside, and took the roses Jenna held out to me wrapped in a paper towel. Her lips were pressed together, just like Emily's expression when she was trying not to laugh.

I stalked down the sidewalk outside. Panda scampered to keep up with me. "Are you really fired?"

"Of course not," I sighed. "She fires me about once a week in the summers. I guess I'll take the rest of the day off, though. What's all this for?" I slowed to a stop at the edge of the enormous crowd. The air smelled like hamburgers and funnel cakes. People stood or sat together on towels, picnicking. I could hardly see a bare patch of grass or wharf, but it wasn't quite time for the wakeboarding show.

"They're crowning the Crappie Queen!" Panda said.

"If you're going to hang around here, you need to use the correct pronunciation. It's Crappy Queen."

"It's Mandy."

Sure enough, down on the wharf, Mr. Fitch was calling Mandy forward as the new Crappy Queen. There was some justice in the world.

And then I changed my mind. Instead of the evening gown I'd seen at Crappy Festivals past, Mandy skipped onto the wharf in cutoff jeans pulled over her bathing suit, and bare feet. She grinned while the outgoing Crappy Queen pinned a tiara in the shape of a fish into her hair. Maybe old Mandy was all right after all.

"Pardon," Cook said right behind me. He shoved me off the sidewalk. I shoved him back, then realized that when he pushed me, he'd tucked another rose into my bouquet. Walking backward down the hill, he blew a kiss at Panda. Panda giggled and blew him a kiss back.

Another voice behind me said. "A-choo!" SOMETHING FLEW INTO MY BOUQUET. I almost dropped my beautiful roses to avoid further contact with nastiness. But it was only Effy, pretending to sneeze another rose at me.

"Racking up, aren't you?" Panda asked, and I had to grin.

Right after Effy came Katie. Her nose was only a little blue. I could hardly tell it had bled the night before. Katie was like that. And she held a rose between her teeth.

I smirked at her. "Don't tell me. You want me to come and get it."

"Oh, no," she said through a mouthful of stem, holding up her hands in warning. "Emily would kill me." She handed me the (spitty) rose. "Did Dad crown Mandy the Crappy Queen yet?"

"Yes," Panda and I said together.

Katie's face fell. "Oh!" She ran down the sidewalk. At the bottom of the hill, she caught Mandy by the arm and talked to her for a few seconds. Her face fell further, and Mandy shook her head. She walked away after the others, toward the wakeboarding boat. I almost felt sorry for her.

"I'm going to congratulate Mandy on her coronation," I said to Panda.

"You aw?" Panda said with her mouth full of candy bar. "Uhhhhh-"

"Come with me, because you're my friend and help me without question. I may need someone to call 911 if she breaks my arm."

"I'w be wight behiwd woo."

I maneuvered down the hill through the crowd, using the roses to clear the way in front of me. Now Mandy talked with an elderly couple, which might make her less likely to deck me. "Mandy!" I squealed, jumping up and down, spilling petals, "Congratulations!"

She stared at me like a fish out of water, but the elderly couple thanked me in the manner of clueless grandparents, which got us out of that embarrassing little moment.

"I need to tell you a couple things," I said, hugging the roses to my chest and putting my other arm around her.

"Come this way," Panda said, moving along the seawall. Mandy looked back to signal the elderly couple to save her, but I moved in, blocking her view. What a team Panda and I made. Beyond the crowd, Panda sat on the seawall with her legs hanging over. I did the same, and Mandy sat between us.

"It wasn't my idea to enter," Mandy spoke up defensively. "I caught a two pounder, and my granddad said we could _not _let the mayor's daughter win again this year with only a one-pounder and a plastic minnow."

Mandy rose further in my opinion.

"I didn't need to tell you how bizarre that is," I said. "Obviously you have a sixth sense about these things." I nodded toward Katie cranking the boat and backing it away from the wharf. Cook was in the bow, Effy sat further back, and Emily was bent below the side of the boat, gathering something. "I needed to tell you Katie is really in love with you."

Now _she_ looked toward the boat puttering across the inlet. "How do you know? You can just tell, right? You can tell by the way she acts? After the last couple of weeks, I'll never be able to trust _that_ again." She tried to sound tough, but her delivery was stilted, and her eyes rolled for emphasis at the wrong place. I'd never actually talked to her before -I'd only watched her from afar - or I would have noticed this. She came off as a lot younger and more unsure of herself than I'd expected. Which made me like her even better.

"I know because she told me," I said. The boat pointed in our direction, almost like it was heading for us rather than the open water. "I also needed to tell you your wakeboard bindings came in at the showroom this morning."

"Oooh, I forgot Katie gave you a wakeboard!" Panda said. "I wish I could learn."

"It's fun," I said. Maybe Cook could take Panda out wakeboarding. Maybe Katie could invite Mandy again and hope she would show up this time. Of course, both Katie and Cook would have to fight the girls every step of the way. We were good together, but it would be nice to wakeboard with other people once in awhile, without a freaking outcry and rumors of mutiny.

"Hey," I said suddenly. "I have a boat." There it was, tied on the side of the dock in front of my house. We hardly ever used it because we were always in the Fitch's boat. I nudged Panda. "If you want, come over after I get off work tomorrow, and I'll teach you to wakeboard." I turned to Mandy. "You too, Miss Crappy." Of course, they probably didn't have boaters' licenses, which meant I'd have to drive. They'd be learning to wakeboard, so I'd just take them around in slow circles. Surely I couldn't mess that up. They wouldn't suspect a thing.

"That would be great!" Panda exclaimed. She touched Mandy's bare toes with her toes. "I'll pick you up, Your Crappiness"

In case Panda got the wrong idea, I warned her, "Cook won't be with us. He'll be with the others. This will be an us trip."

"I know," she said, as if she _did_ really know and wasn't trying to get out of it.

"But we could cruise by the warehouse very slowly like we need to borrow another tow rope," I said. "I have become an expert at seduction."

Mandy snorted, then gave up suppressing it and proceeded to laugh her ass off. The Crapy Crown detangled itself from her hair and would have fallen in the lake if I hadn't caught it for her. Finally she calmed enough to cough out, "I don't know. I'm not very graceful."

"Who am I," I asked, "Michelle Kwan?"

"Not hardly," Panda said at the same time Mandy said, "I see your point." But neither of them was looking at me. They watched the wakeboarding boat float right in front of us, full of girl.

Specifically, full of Emily. She stood in the bow, one arm cradling a bouquet of roses, she held her other hand out to me.

Cook leaned over the bow, too, and caught the seawall, holding the boat there so it didn't scrape against the wall and didn't drift away. The boys had planned ahead. For once.

Ninety-nine percent of me leaped up immediately and knocked Emily over, hugging her. One percent was still bitter about the bitch comment, and angry that I'd been tricked into coming out here to wait like some airhead flirt for Emily to happen by. This one percent was heavier than the rest combined and anchored me to the seawall. I elbowed Panda. "Traitor."

"I was helping you without question," she said.

"And your mum!" I yelled to Emily. "Did you ask your mum to get me out here?"

"I told her to fire you if she had to," she called. "Did she fire you?"

"Mama Fitch has some feminine wiles!" I exclaimed.

Emily laughed. "She's got maybe one more feminine wile than you, and you've got maybe three fourths of a wile." She tilted her head and wiggled the fingers of her outstretched hand. "Come with us. We want you to close the show. Right, Katie?"

"Right!" Katie said with fake enthusiasm. From the back of the boat, Effy waved my wakeboard at me to show me, again, that they'd thought ahead.

"I'm not supposed to get my stitches wet," I reasoned.

"Don't fall," Emily reasoned right back.

I wanted to go. I couldn't quite detach the heavy one percent. "You called me a bitch. I'm not running back to you when you leave me a dozen roses."

"Four more." she waved her smaller bouquet at me. "Sixteen total. Birthday or what?"

Mandy shoved me forward - which, since I was sitting down, didn't push me into the boat. It only folded me over like a movie theater seat.

"You can think about it," Emily said. "The four of us can take our turns, and we'll come back to see if you've changed your mind. But I want you to come with us now." In a singsong voice she coaxed, "I'll let you drive."

Cook and Effy stared at Emily, eyes wide with fear. Katie coughed, "Bullshit."

"I'll let you drive when _I'm_ wakeboarding anyway," Emily said.

"It's love," Cook said, motioning with his head for me to get in the boat. "Let Panda hold your roses so they don't go bald in the wind."

Cook's blessing was the final push I needed. I held out my arms for the extra roses from Emily and inhaled one last long sniff before handing off he whole huge bouquet to Panda. Then I took Emily's hand and let her help me in. Cook shoved the bow away from the seawall and walked into the back of the boat, muttering, "Fucking femme fatale."

As we puttered out of the idle zone, I gave Mandy and Panda a pageant wave. They waved back and clapped for me. The boat reached the open water and sped up. The motor and Nickelback drowned out the clapping. Emily grabbed my waving hand, and we did the secret handshake.

As we sank to the bow seat, I touched her skull and crossbones pendant on a new leather string. "They still have these in the bubblegum machine?"

"Katie went under the dock and found it for me."

I nodded. "She was the best choice to rescue it for you. She has no fear of bryozoa." Squinting into the sun behind Emily, I looked up into her eyes. "One day on the boat when we were kids, did you tell me you wanted me to be your girlfriend when we were old enough?"

She slid her hand down a lock of my hair and twisted it around her fingers. "I don't remember saying that, but I wouldn't be surprised. I wasn't lying that day in the truck. I really have loved you forever. Why else would I wear a skull and crossbones necklace you bought me from a bubblegum machine? It turned my skin green."

"It didn't." To make sure, I moved the pendant aside and peered at her chest, which looked the normal scrumptious tan to me. "It didn't," I repeated with more confidence.

"It did when you first gave it to me. Any metal coating that might have been clinging to it wore off on my chest years ago."

Come to think of it, the pendant _was_ a funny colour not found in nature. I'd probably given her lead poisoning, which was why she acted like that. I ran my fingertips down the bones, and poked the skull in the eyes. "You know, you could have told me you loved me a long time ago, before things got so crazy."

"No, I couldn't. I like to take chances. I'd blow a chance on anything but you. You didn't love _me_."

Didn't I? It was hard to believe I'd called her _little dolphin _just two weeks before. "I didn't think about you that way. Clearly I was capable of it. Because I love you now."

She grinned and took my hand. "We should add another step to the secret handshake."

"Then we couldn't do it in public." I turned her hand over and ran my fingertip lightly over her palm until she shivered. "When Katie came up to your mom because a fish had mouthed her toe, and my mom said said I should just wait until I was sixteen... That wasn't Katie. That was you. Right?"

She put her head close to mine, watching my finger trace valentines in her open hand.

"I didn't want you to like me because you thought you were supposed to. I wanted you to like me for me." Her breathing sounded funny. She was about to cry - which was going to cause her a world of trouble with the girls. She could live her first time down owing to the shock of seeing me crash into a very large, very stationary object. But if she cried again, she was toast.

I knew one way to stop her. I hollered above the motor, "Oh my God, Emily, are you about to cry?"

"Oh my God!" Katie echoed. Effy squealed, "Emily don't cry!" Cook called, "No crying on the boat."

Emily laughs with tears in her eyes and kissed me softly on the forehead, the side away from the stitches. And suddenly, to my complete horror, I was the one crying, sobbing into her chest. I was happy, but that wasn't why I was crying. I was relieved. Relieved of a weight I couldn't even name.

She held me more tightly and kissed my forehead several more times, then made her way down my cheek, dangerously close to my ear. I giggled at the same time I cried. If she didn't stop, she was going to give me hiccups - which would be so incredibly sexy, on top of messing up my timing for wakeboarding jumps.

She kissed my lips. "What do you want to do tonight?" she whispered.

What a question!

"Put our names back on the bridge," I said. "Only, you hold the sailboat this time, and I'll take care of the handwriting." I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, enjoying the warmth of Emily's arms around me against the wind. We sat back and watched the other boats and the crowded banks of the lake spin by. When the show started, we spotted for the others while they took their turns. Then it was Emily's turn, and mine.


End file.
